Protocol Maintenance Tasks

Compound v2 is over three years old, and in that time, the protocol has significantly evolved. There are certain maintenance tasks which haven’t kept pace, or have been overlooked during that time.

Below is a partial list of maintenance tasks which could be addressed by one or more governance proposals. While these might be low-impact or invisible to users, it would be good governance hygiene to address them.

Deprecated Markets

  • SAI, FEI, REP and WBTC (legacy; there are two WBTC markets) are all deprecated, with ~no borrowing remaining. The markets still hold reserves denominated in their native asset. These reserves can be withdrawn, and potentially converted into reserves of another market with active borrows / the potential to incur bad debt. For example, SAI, FEI, and REP reserves could be converted into USDC reserves, and WBTC migrated to the newer WBTC market reserves.
  • WBTC (legacy) still has a 70% collateral factor; to match the other deprecated markets, this could carefully be set to 0%, eliminating the risk of this market.

Current Markets

  • Similar to the deprecated markets, old markets including BAT and ZRX contain reserves which are significantly greater than the total assets borrowed in those markets; the excess (beyond the maximum potential bad debt) could be safely transferred to the Timelock / governance to reduce the technical risk of the reserves sitting in the protocol.
  • Now that the Merge is complete, the COMP distribution to cETH can be migrated per prior discussion.
  • DAI was designed to sweep balances into the DAI Savings Rate module of MakerDAO; this functionality was reverted when the DSR dropped to 0.01%. With the DSR being re-activated, re-reverting the cDAI token version to the sweeping version could make sense.

Comptroller & Timelock

  • The Comptroller contract contains a significant amount of COMP that is undistributed to users. To reduce technical risk (e.g. the Proposal 62 bug), the excess could be transferred to the Timelock / governance.
  • The Timelock contains a mix of cTokens and tokens; the cTokens can be redeemed for their underlying assets

Block Speeds

  • Many of the interest rate models were deployed before the Merge, which reduced Ethereum’s block speed to 12 seconds. The block speed assumptions in these models can be updated.

Please add to this list, if possible!

12 Likes

Two other suggestions that relate to governance enhancements:

7 Likes

Both Robert’s and Cylon’s suggestions make sense to me, and in my opinion, should be implemented.

1 Like

Gauntlet is happy to help with on-chain proposals to lower WBTC collateral factor. In addition, we are currently conducting research on optimizing interest rate curves for Compound v2 markets and will keep the community posted.

3 Likes

We’ve made a governance proposal, packed with 10 actions towards the reserve maintenance actions listed above. It tackles withdrawing reserves for SAI, REP, FEI, and WBTC, redeeming cDAI and cUNI, redeeming SAI for WETH, and converting REP to REPv2. The proposal script used to generate this proposal verifies that balances corresponding to each action were as expected after simulation of the governance proposal. We welcome additional sanity checks on the proposal actions to be performed by the community.

5 Likes