Proposal: Tally as a Dedicated Governance Service Provider to the Compound DAO
General Overview
Company/Protocol Name and Brief Background: Tally is a full-stack governance platform for onchain DAOs. We provide the leading interface for creating proposals, delegating, and voting using Governor-based contracts. In addition to core functionality, Tally supports advanced governance features like staking and multichain governance. Launched in 2020, Tally supports over 500 DAOs and is built specifically around Compound’s own Governor architecture. Over 7,000 proposals have been made on Tally and over $1billion in treasury value has been transferred via proposals that were created, voted, and executed on Tally.
List Existing History with Compound Protocol/DAO:
- Tally has supported Compound governance continuously since December 2020, making it our longest-standing DAO relationship. See Compound DAO homepage here.
- Our platform was built on top of the Governor standard, originally pioneered by Compound.
- Tally is the default governance interface used by Compound DAO contributors to vote, delegate, and create proposals.
- We recently completed the “Tally UX for Compound-specific Proposals” grant, delivering:
- Added support in Tally’s UI for creating proposals that interact with key Compound contracts, including Governor, Compound v2, and Comet.
- Enabled creation of cross-chain Compound proposals directly through Tally’s interface.
- Improved visibility into proposals created outside of Tally by decoding calldata for mainnet Ethereum proposals.
- We have deep familiarity with Compound’s governance architecture, contributor workflows, delegates, and evolving needs.
Section 1: Platform Functionality
1a) Platform Overview and Feature Set
Live since 2020, Tally is the most feature-rich and battle-tested governance platform in the ecosystem, with full support for every stage of the onchain governance lifecycle. Our platform enables proposal creation (including arbitrary executable calls, no-code transfers, and MEV-protected swaps), live vote tracking, and execution status updates. We offer voting, proposal simulations using Tenderly, proposal execution, notifications, DAO analytics, Gnosis Safe management, integrations with Discourse and Snapshot, and DAO analytics (“Tally-litics”). Tally has a full-featured public API that is used by builders across the Ethereum ecosystem to power governance applications.
Outside the scope of this proposal, Tally also offers staking and multichain governance (MultiGov). Tally’s modular, audited staking system is purpose-built for DAOs, designed to align incentives between DAOs and tokenholders. We also offer MultiGov, a production-ready multichain governance framework that anchors proposal creation and voting on Ethereum while supporting secure cross-chain execution. MultiGov preserves delegate reputation, voting history, and governance continuity as token liquidity expands across chains. Each of these features may be turned on by Compound, via proposal, at any time.
1b) Service Tiers and Customization Levels
Tally is proposing an enterprise tier agreement that includes a dedicated feature roadmap, developer support, regular reporting, and SLAs.
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. 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. • Seatbelt integration: Security simulation framework that runs a full Tenderly replay, verifies contracts, decodes calldata, performs Slither static analysis, and generates a human-readable report for each live proposal. |
| 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. |
Enterprise support includes the following 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.
Compound may instead use Tally’s baseline implementation (“self-serve tier”). 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 above.
1c) Existing Partnerships
Over 500 DAOs use Tally for governance, all publicly viewable here. Some of the most prominent include Arbitrum, Wormhole, zkSync, Uniswap, Obol, ENS, EigenLayer—and of course, Compound, which has used Tally continuously for over 4.5 years.
Many of these DAOs use Tally for the full proposal lifecycle, including onchain proposal creation, delegate dashboards, voting, and execution. Uniswap has an enterprise support agreement in place with Tally.
Section 2: Technical Integration and Security Assessment
2a) Audit History and Security Reviews
Tally takes security seriously and values the contributions of security researchers who help keep our platform and users safe. Our security practices are documented here. We have a clear reporting process and reward system in place for valuable reports.
Tally’s architecture is built around OpenZeppelin Governor. OpenZeppelin’s security practices can be reviewed here.
Tally has developed open source staking contracts, which can be viewed on Github and read about on our docs. The public audit reports are listed here.
2b) Integration Requirements and Implementation Timeline
Tally has supported Compound governance since its inception in December 2020 and remains the longest continuously-operating DAO governance provider. No new integration work is required — Compound is already fully supported on Tally, with complete compatibility for Governor and its custom implementations. Our system imposes no constraints on future upgrades, requires no onchain proposals or contract changes, and is ready to continue serving the DAO without delay.
2c) On-chain/Off-chain Data Alignment and Proposal Verification
Tally is a modular application layer for viewing the state of and interacting with on-chain governance contracts. Our product is explicitly designed to match the on-chain state. We offer multiple tools to verify the information on our app matches the on-chain state, including Tenderly Simulations. We will soon display Seatbelt simulations. The calldata of every proposal can be reviewed prior to proposal creation and on the proposal page before voting.
2d) Developer Support:
Tally’s developer documentation is available at https://docs.tally.xyz, including integration guides, best practices, and reference materials for working with our APIs, SDK, and governance infrastructure. We provide hands-on developer support for partners, including dedicated support channels and direct engineering assistance.
Enterprise-level support is available to Compound as part of our enterprise support tier. Our self-serve tier is best-effort and community-supported, offering access to documentation and occasional help via public channels.
For any questions related to this proposal, please reach out to @coolhorsegirl on Telegram.
2e) Threat Modeling:
Many of the attack vectors listed in the prompt are relevant to Tally, including frontend injection, domain spoofing, calldata spoofing, supply chain attacks, and DDoS. More information is available about Tally’s security in our documentation. We are happy to discuss our security posture in more detail if delegates have specific questions.
Section 3: Commercial Terms & Commitment
3a) Budget Request
We are requesting a $150,000 USD budget for a 12-month enterprise engagement with Compound DAO.
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 for staking and multichain governance. These two areas are out of scope for this service agreement and would be priced separately.
3b) Milestone-Based Payment Structure
Maintenance/Uptime:
- Uptime Guarantee: Maintain 99.9% uptime for frontend and API services on a monthly basis.
- Response Time SLA: Respond to critical support requests (e.g., governance outages or vote failures) within 4 business hours and resolve or escalate within 24 hours.
- Incident & Uptime Reporting: Publish a quarterly incident + uptime report covering response time, resolution details, and mitigation steps.
- Maintenance & Change Management: Notify the DAO at least 7 days in advance of any major platform changes (e.g., UI redesigns, vote transaction flow updates) that may affect governance participation.
Bug Resolution Timeframes: Fix non-critical bugs within 5 business days; critical bugs resolved or mitigated within 1 business day. - Monthly Feedback Loop: Host open office hours once per month for Compound contributors to raise issues or feature requests directly.
Usage/Adoption:
- Feature delivery by end of Q1 of this agreement (as shown in table in above section)
- Advanced simulations specific to Compound contracts
- Gasless voting
- Custom domain
- Karma integration
- Tally Zero
- Homepages for Compound Safe
Governance participation metrics are vulnerable to sybil attack. We recommend tying success to a broader set of product delivery and reliability metrics like customer satisfaction and the ones mentioned above in Maintenance/Uptime.
3c) Offboarding, Data Portability, and Sunset Plans
There are no constraints to using a new provider. Tally is a modular application layer built on open standards (Governor) and there is no dependency on Tally at the smart contract level.
For governance resilience, Tally also offers 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. We plan to deliver this for Compound in the first quarter of this agreement.
Final Considerations
We believe Compound is best served by a partner who knows its history, is invested in its future, and can deliver on both.
Tally has supported Compound governance since 2020, when we built our platform on top of the Governor system introduced by Compound. We’ve served as Compound’s primary governance interface since then, providing ongoing support, infrastructure, and custom feature development. Formalizing Compound DAO’s relationship with Tally ensures continuity, a proven track record of support, and a product roadmap designed to evolve alongside Compound.
- Site: https://tally.xyz
- Docs: https://docs.tally.xyz
- Compound’s page on Tally: Tally | Compound