Thank you @Avantgarde for the questions and encouragement. We appreciate the opportunity to provide more clarity.
1. On collaboration and alignment generally:
We fully agree that alignment is key. Our intent is to continue working with existing contributors across:
- Growth: Refining the technical details of strategic growth initiatives, ensuring quantitative rigor and practical implementation
- Smart contract development: Ensuring new features are economically sound, strategically aligned, and optimized for protocol objectives
- Risk management: Developing and aligning risk frameworks for proposed protocol upgrades, ensuring security and stability. Reviewing risk parameterization as needed
- Security auditing: Supporting validation of design choices
This has been our approach since we began working on Compound at the end of last year. Examples include providing feedback to WOOF! on Sandbox and assisting AlphaGrowth on initiatives such as OEV.
2. On collaboration and alignment specifically for V4:
Organization
V4 is still in its infancy, so there remains a lot of logistical uncertainty, but here’s what we can speak to for now.
We’ve participated in V4 discussions coordinated by @cmrn with other contributors such as @Pasha, @dmitriywoofsoftware, @Sudipan_Chainrisk, and PR Genius present as well. As outlined in @cmrn’s diagram, the working structure is still early and fluid. We welcome collaboration from all interested contributors as this takes shape.
The Compound Foundation is also beginning to take shape, which will likely play an important role in coordinating long-term protocol development.
One idea we heard from @cylon was forming a V4 Design Committee, which could be a valuable mechanism for community alignment and structured decision-making.
A combination of these efforts may be necessary to ensure V4 progresses smoothly and in a timely manner.
Philosophy
The technical design space for V4 is vast and high dimensional. On top of all the technical ideas other community members have already brought forth, there are numerous constraints in terms of growth timelines, contract architecture, risk considerations, audit surfaces etc from other service providers and stakeholders that need to be taken into account. Since we don’t have all of this information, it’s infeasible for us to “drive our own ideas entirely” and the only viable path towards success is through continuous collaboration and tight feedback loops.
Given our research specialization, we will continue to present various comprehensive designs and their associated tradeoffs, including our view on which design may be most promising given the available information. From there, it’s up to the community to align, exchange perspectives, and ultimately decide how to proceed.
3. On future scope and structure:
Over the past three months we have contributed
- Long form research on collateral factors
- A basic competitive analysis of overcollateralized lending
- Feedback on Sandbox design
- Analysis for enabling LP tokens as collateral
- Analysis for the Compound rate stabilization vault
and just posted analysis on @Avantgarde’s growth strategy for the Compound treasury.
We’re happy to collaborate with @Avantgarde and others on new initiatives that benefit Compound. We view this type of exploratory analysis, often unrelated to V4, as an integral part of product research in a decentralized context. However, given the urgency of a protocol upgrade, we need to juggle supporting immediate opportunities with developing long-term solutions.
As outlined in the proposal, we would prefer to focus on progressing designs for V4 to a point where the community can review a first iteration, as this seems to be the most pressing bottleneck at the moment. That said, we welcome any differing opinions from the community and are open to revising our proposal accordingly.
Furthermore, the unpredictable nature of new business opportunities presents challenges, as we can’t forecast every future request. Our concern isn’t taking on meaningful work but rather avoiding a situation where we’re overextended evaluating numerous new initiatives without sufficient clarity, prioritization or budget.
In that context, trying to put a worthwhile price for “an unknown amount of work in the future” is more daunting for us than it might be for the DAO.
We raise this not to limit scope, but to advocate for mutual trust and transparent dialogue around expectations, emphasizing the balance required between addressing existing needs and advancing future protocol objectives.
Ultimately, we hope our contributions so far speak to our commitment to Compound’s success.
Hopefully this addresses your questions. If not, don’t hesitate to follow up or reach out to us to chat.