Hello Compound Community,
My name is Watson, and I’m excited to re-engage with the Compound ecosystem as part of our new venture, Platonia. At Platonia, our mission is to empower protocols through quantitative solutions and DeFi native research. Drawing from backgrounds in quant trading at firms such as Flow Traders, Jane Street, Citadel and the Chicago Trading Company, our team brings expertise in state of the art financial modeling and optimization techniques and a deep understanding of financial markets. Exciting advancements in Compound, such as the recent proposal for a Sandbox deployment, present a compelling opportunity for Platonia to provide its services.
I previously served as Head of Market Risk at Gauntlet where I was responsible for the development of robust strategies regarding anomalous market events including the USDC depeg response and mitigation on Aave and market microstructure improvements such as the Synchronicity price adapter killswitch functionality for LST emode on Aave. In addition, I presented a general framework for Economic Resilience for protocols at the Risk Summit at DevConnect Istanbul.
Joining me at Platonia are longtime collaborators, HT and Victor. HT was the Engineering Manager for Risk at Gauntlet and an author of the first published DeFi paper on Compound at the Foundations and Applications of Blockchain conference back in 2020 along with the initial Compound Economic Security report. Victor was the Head of Models at Gauntlet where he built out parameter optimization methodologies along with market microstructure models that are still in use for Compound today.
In the past we’ve driven improvement proposals to Compound such as the polarizing parameter update of decreasing WBTC collateral factor in early 2021. This was highly controversial, but led to an order of magnitude fewer liquidations on Compound compared to Aave during the market capitulation of May 2021. Beyond our Compound-specific contributions, our team collectively has over 12 years of experience spanning protocol mechanism design and risk assessments, dynamic parameter optimization and managing high-stakes market risk events for protocols all across DeFi.
As long-standing users and contributors to Compound since its inception, we have a deep appreciation for the innovation and resilience of this community. Having witnessed the meteoric rise in TVL on Aave over the years and the emergence of newer projects such as Morpho, we see this as a pivotal moment for Compound to strengthen its position as a leader in the DeFi lending space.
In the coming months, we look forward to actively participating in community calls and discussions, communicating actionable insights to guide protocol developments and collaborating to drive Compound’s continued success.
Looking forward to contributing to the vibrant evolution of the Compound ecosystem!