As an early innovator in DeFi, Compound created the standard for onchain governance that shapes how protocols operate today. Tally has proudly supported Compound governance since December 2020 and built our platform on top of the Governor standard. Today, we are Compound’s primary governance platform, evolving our implementation to better support the needs of the community grants and ongoing development.
DeFi governance is changing. Token holders now expect stronger systems for participation, security, and alignment. We’re seeing the emergence of Foundations as leading forces in protocol and governance development. Compound DAO has publicly announced plans to implement staking as a mechanism to reward long-term contributors and protect governance integrity. And as $COMP expands across chains that did not even exist at the time Compound launched governance, governance must meet token holders where they are.
Tally believes Compound DAO is uniquely positioned to lead this next era of DAO infrastructure. We propose a service agreement between Tally and the Compound Governance Support Working Group (GSWG) to formalize ongoing governance support and quarterly delivery of Compound-specific priorities.
Background
Compound has been served by Tally’s category-leading software since 2020. Tally is the preferred governance platform for Compound delegates and contributors to vote, delegate, and create and execute proposals. We recently successfully delivered of the Tally UX for Compound-specific Proposals grant. As part of this grant, we shipped a tailored UX for Compound proposals, supporting protocol contracts on Ethereum and cross-chain proposals while improving calldata decoding.
Proposed Scope of Work
Rather than a rigid scope, we propose a flexible engagement model where the Compound Governance Support Working Group (GSWG) sets quarterly priorities and Tally executes these initiatives directly. This model ensures alignment with Foundation and DAO-wide goals while enabling us to adapt as governance evolves.
Areas of Work
After consultation with the GSWG, we have prioritised the example deliverables within each workstream. We expect to deliver the bolded items within the first quarter of this engagement.
| Workstream | Example Deliverables |
|---|---|
| Compound proposal UX | • Advanced simulations specific to Compound contracts: Deep simulation support tailored to Compound’s architecture, enabling users to preview proposal effects before onchain execution. • Custom proposal actions for Compound contracts and proposal scripts: Support for advanced Compound-specific actions, including scripted proposals and custom calldata. • Decode calldata of cross-chain proposals made off Tally (e.g. via script): Tally will automatically decode calldata for proposals submitted via external scripts or other frontends, including cross-chain messages, so users can easily understand what actions a proposal will take — even if it wasn’t created on Tally. • Automatic proposal execution: The automation of enacting passed proposals without manual intervention – once a proposal is approved onchain, it is queued and executed by a bot, streamlining governance by removing the need for delegates to execute transactions themselves. |
| Voting UX | • Gasless voting: A relayer-powered voting mechanism that lets token holders vote onchain for free. This will allow Compound DAO to sponsor gas fees for votes, so participants can cast votes without paying gas, lowering the barrier to governance participation. • Custom domain: Compound DAO can host Tally governance portal on a unique, branded domain or subdomain like gov.compound.finance. • Karma integration: Tally will display delegates’ Karma scores within the Tally UI. Karma is a delegate reputation tool that supports Compound. Every delegate’s profile displays a Karma score reflecting their activity and reliability (e.g. voting participation rate onchain and engagement in forums), helping token holders identify and differentiate highly active, “high-quality” delegates from less active ones. • Forum bot: Tally’s forum bot automatically posts updates in the Compound DAO Discourse forum when a proposal moves to the voting stage and when voting concludes, keeping the forum in sync with onchain governance activity. • Improved notifications: Enhanced governance alerts with expanded platform support (e.g. email, Telegram, Discord) and customizable preferences so users can choose which proposal or DAO events they want to be notified about and how. • MarketAdmin proposals: Display transactions made via the alternate governance track for market updates. • Rollback UI integration: Frontend to support Compound’s upcoming Emergency Upgrade Rollback system, providing visibility into rollback-enabled proposals, queued rollback transactions, execution windows, and guardian activity. |
| Governance resilience | • Tally Zero: A fully decentralized, read-only governance app and backup interface with live data sync, requiring zero reliance on Tally’s servers or backend. Tally Zero is an IPFS-hosted front-end that anyone can run to view proposals and cast votes directly on-chain via any Governor contract, ensuring that governance can continue uninterrupted even if the main Tally app is down. |
| Transparency & Reporting | • Homepages for Compound Safes: Dedicated Safe pages within Tally that enhance multisig visibility, showing signer addresses, transactions, and token balances. • DAO Analytics dashboard (”Tally-litics”): A dashboard with real-time charts and metrics visualizing DAO activity — including proposal trends, turnout rates, top voters, and execution stats — to give Compound DAO a snapshot of governance health. • Success metrics: On the Compound DAO homepage on Tally, Tally will show key governance performance indicators tracked to measure the health and effectiveness of the DAO’s processes. • Treasury Analytics: A module surfacing real-time insights into DAO treasuries — including token holdings, inflows/outflows, runway projections, and historical changes |
| Support & Uptime Guarantees | See “SLAs” section below. |
*Tally plans to participate in the Staking RFP and contribute to a proposal to enable multichain governance. More on this in “Future Support Areas”.
SLAs
- Tally usage
- We will continue to track the number of proposals and % of votes per proposal made on Tally and report on those to the DAO.
- Roadmap feature usage
- As we roll out new features for the Compound DAO, we will track usage of those features and report on them to the DAO.
- Monthly office hours
- An open feedback session for Compound DAO contributors to suggest new features and contribute to our roadmap
- Uptime and availability
- System Uptime: 99% monthly uptime, ensuring the system is accessible with minimal disruptions.
- Scheduled Downtime: Maximum of 2% monthly allowance for scheduled maintenance, communicated in advance.
- Response and resolution time
- Incident Response Time: Initial response within 4 hours for high-priority incidents (e.g., outages) during working hours in the United States, and 24 hours for incidents outside of working hours and low-priority issues.
- Resolution Time: Resolution or workaround within 8 hours for high-priority incidents (e.g., outages) during working hours in the United States, and 24 hours for incidents outside of working hours.
- Maintenance and support
- Bug Resolution: Resolution of non-critical bugs within 5 business days and critical bugs within 1 business day. For bugs that are not possible to resolve in this time frame, a post-mortem analysis to be shared with the DAO following resolution.
- Regular Maintenance Updates: Regular monthly maintenance updates, including minor upgrades, patches, and performance improvements.
- Public API access
- Tally provides open access to its governance API, allowing developers to query proposal data, vote records, delegate profiles, and DAO metadata. We ensure 99% monthly uptime for the API and will notify the DAO of any major updates, deprecations, or downtime.
- Feature requests and support for API integrations can be raised during monthly office hours or through direct support channels.
Cost
We propose a 12-month engagement at a fixed rate of $150,000 per year.
This represents a discount from our typical $250,000 annual rate for enterprise support and custom development work, reflecting that we plan to contribute to future proposals in the Compound DAO including the Staking RFP and a proposal to enable multichain governance. These two areas are out of scope for this service agreement and would be priced separately.
Tally will be paid in quarterly installments in COMP by the GSWG at the end of each quarter of work. Prior to payment, Tally will provide a quarterly report detailing key achievements, including uptime metrics, notes from Community Calls, and support metrics. GSWG will review Tally’s performance against deliverables and SLAs before paying.
We would also like to clarify what a baseline (“self-serve”) implementation of Tally looks like as an alternative to voting YES on this proposal. Tally’s self-serve governance product includes only our public platform with a proposal fee and does not include any of the additional services described in this proposal including the items listed below:
- Compound proposal UX
- Voting UX
- Governance resilience
- Transparency & reporting
- Support & uptime guarantees / SLAs
Voting Options
When this proposal moves to a vote, voting options will include:
- Yes — Move forward with Tally as a dedicated governance service provider to Compound DAO.
- No — Use Tally’s self-serve governance product with a proposal fee.
Future Support Areas
Tally is excited to support Compound DAO’s long-term growth through future initiatives such as staking and multichain governance. While out of scope for this proposal, both can be pursued through separate agreements as priorities align.
Staking
Tally believes implementing staking is a natural evolution for Compound, and we are keen to participate in the RFP for staking providers. Tally has developed a modular, audited staking system purpose-built for DAOs. Unlike staking systems focused solely on financial rewards, our infrastructure is designed to enhance governance integrity and flexibility — giving Compound DAO control over how staking impacts voting and participation.
For more information:
Multichain governance
Since its governance launch over four years ago, Compound DAO has expanded beyond Ethereum, with significant COMP token liquidity now present across multiple chains. The growing multichain presence of COMP creates new challenges and opportunities for Compound’s governance infrastructure. These tokens cannot participate in voting unless bridged back to Ethereum.
Tally’s MultiGov system supports secure, cross-chain proposal execution while anchoring voting and proposal creation on Ethereum. This design preserves delegate reputations, voting power, and proposal history while enabling governance to scale with Compound’s ecosystem. MultiGov is live in production in the Wormhole DAO. We look forward to putting forth a proposal to bring this capability to Compound DAO when the timing aligns.
- MultiGov Demo (password: onchain)