Given our diverse offering we decided to put our services forward to the DAO for consideration.
Lighthouse Labs as a VSP
General Overview
Company/Protocol Name and Brief Background:
Lighthouse Labs is a mobile-native governance platform designed to boost DAO participation and transparency by reaching users where they are: on mobile. We have been operating for three years as a legal company in the UK.
Our governance work extends beyond offering mobile voting solutions. As an applied research lab, we are committed to researching improvements and innovation in decentralised governance. You can find much of our work documented here
List Existing History with Compound Protocol/DAO:
As of March 2025, Compound governance is accessible on the Lighthouse governance app, including new proposal alerts and support for voting on Compound’s Snapshot space and Governor contract on Ethereum.
The average voter turnout on the last 20 governor proposals is ~45. We currently have 11% of this audience subscribed for Compound notifications on Lighthouse.
Section 1: Platform Functionality
1a) Platform Overview and Feature Set
We offer three key features:
Lighthouse Governance
We offer Compound DAO a unique distribution channel through our native iOS & Android app, which features real-time proposal tracking, push notifications, and seamless voting on both Snapshot polls and on-chain Governor proposals.
Our solution is biased towards a mobile user experience (UX), allowing COMP holders and delegates to vote, discuss, and stay informed anywhere, anytime, while maintaining robust on-chain infrastructure support (e.g. Safe multisig voting). We are also pushing for stronger Safe infrastructure.
It should be noted that we do not plan on focusing on proposal creation/execution in the near term. Existing vendors like Tally do a great job at this and it does not make sense to duplicate efforts.
Lighthouse Dispatch, For WG Leaders
We have a working messaging system we could freely offer to pilot with the DAO. This unlocks a secure manner in which DAO leaders can message key token holders.
Without Dispatch, there is no way to easily message Compound’s 200k+ holders. Our system saves users from having to reveal their email addresses to register, and our delivery platform has been purpose-built to reach users at scale.
In addition to proposals, DAO leaders or WG leads could have permissioned access to broadcast announcements, events or other notices to all DAO members. These messages could also be archived on-chain for ultimate transparency, laying the groundwork to establish a DUNA-compliant communications framework, aiding overall strategic objectives.
Signals Protocol
We have designed a brand new sensemaking protocol that addresses some of the biggest challenges DAOs face when trying to achieve community alignment. Signals is still under active development, which means that as a customer, Compound would be invited to help shape the design of the final product. Read more about it here.
1b) Service Tiers and Customization Levels
Lighthouse Labs will provide a modern, mobile-first governance service to Compound DAO.
We acknowledge that as a new vendor with a unique distribution channel, our approach may differ from other vendors. Our goal is to target those DAO members who would be particularly activated by the unique strategies our native mobile experience provides.
Our services under this agreement will include:
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Voting Service: We will continue to provide a best-in-class native mobile voting experience. Users receive real-time alerts ensuring no one misses critical votes.
- We will add tailored alerts for key stages in the COMP governance lifecycle
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Priority Service: Our work spans many layers of the governance stack. As a paying customer, this means that for all ecosystem improvements we unlock through our R&D efforts, Compound DAO will receive priority access and customisation. Example projects include:
- Safe Multisig voting on the latest Governor contracts
- Concierge onboarding for COMP users
- Buy COMP
- Delegate COMP
- Stake COMP
- Delegate activation (smart notifications and UI)
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Delegation Campaigns: Delegation is core to Compound’s governance architecture. Instead of providing passive dashboards, we will explore ways to proactively encourage in-app delegation flows that will prompt users to assign or change their COMP voting power seamlessly, highlighting top delegates to improve governance engagement.
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Active Engagement and Communication: We commit to joining relevant community calls as needed for the duration of the engagement in an effort to share with members and delegates to discuss progress and gather feedback. We will operate closely with Compound’s Governance Working Group (GWG), Foundation or other providers to explore and refine quarterly priorities.
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Ongoing Maintenance & Custom Requests: As a Compound VSP, we will commit to maintaining 99%+ uptime for our service. We offer wide device support, including compatibility for older operating systems, which allows users with older or cheaper hardware to still access the application.
In summary, Lighthouse will provide Compound with a modern, feature-rich governance platform that improves UX, enhances community engagement, and upholds transparency and security. By leveraging Lighthouse, Compound can offer its participants a modern native mobile voting experience, including notifications, in-app voting and discussions, without having to build or maintain these products in-house.
Our expectation is a mutual agreement of collaboration to solve participation and engagement challenges.
1c) Existing Partnerships
We have a proven track record of collaborating with major DAO ecosystems: for example, we received a grant from SafeDAO to build the first ever native mobile implementation of Safe voting on Snapshot, pioneering a more secure and convenient way for treasury multi-signers to vote via mobile.
We recently contributed to ENS DAO’s governance tooling by building a custom interface and participating in protocol design for their Service Provider Program 2, for which we earned a retroactive grant.
We are also actively working on a new sensemaking protocol called Signals, which has received recognition (and financial awards) from Arbitrum and Uniswap Foundation.
Our work serves to uplift the ecosystem, all of which has a direct impact on aspects of Compound’s meta-governance initiatives. In the Safe/Bybit hack, we were the first team to highlight and propose a focus on decentralisation with Safe’s Transaction Relay which has become a key focus of SAFE’s OBRA Wave 2.
Our grant funding has been openly documented: Grants – Lighthouse Docs
Alchemix is also a fan, https://x.com/AlchemixFi/status/1929545288756445368 and we will be working with them in the near future on their v3 Governance.
We also have started meaningful dialogues with notable teams in the space such as Event Horizon, Butter and Gitcoin to field test some of our more advanced research ideas.
Section 2: Technical Integration and Security Assessment
2a) Audit History and Security Reviews
We are currency unaudited. However, we plan to obtain a SOC-2 and ISO 27001 audit once we raise sufficient funding. Based on our experience building enterprise systems and knowledge of PCI-DSS requirements, we operate isolated environments with limited access and everything is managed over terraform.
We would also be open to working with a trusted engineer from the foundation to assess our systems with the relevant agreements in place as part of due diligence.
2b) Integration Requirements and Implementation Timeline
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Compound is already supported on Lighthouse and up-to-date with the latest Governor contracts and Snapshot. You can download and use it now! Download App | Lighthouse
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Engaging with us will enable us to prioritise additional platform functionality and work through edge cases.
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We intend to complete the body of work documented over the duration of the agreement. We would communicate individual deadlines as needed via our Active Engagement and Communication mandate.
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As an agile, bootstrapped team, we are strategic in how we deploy our resources to maximise impact. For example, when we integrated the latest Governor upgrade we strategically had to omit historical compatibility with the previous two Governor versions.
We wish to be upfront about these choices as we are not VC funded, and our strategy at this time is to focus on new activations and campaigns instead of backwards compatibility.
Our systems already cater for many contract customisations, so we do foresee any particular challenges in accommodating future contract upgrades or requirements and are already at or above par with VC-backed offerings.
Our roadmap has built-in flexibility, ensuring that we can reprioritize features each quarter based on DAO feedback, while still delivering long term value to the DAO.
Any additional feature requests specific to Compound can be discussed with the community – minor features will be included in our service, while larger undertakings (e.g. a major new governance module) may need to be independently scoped in collaboration with the DAO. Our agile team is flexible and committed to evolving the platform in step with Compound DAO’s growth.
We are also more than happy to work with the CGWG to establish key priorities.
2c) On-chain/Off-chain Data Alignment and Proposal Verification
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For each Governor integration, we have integration tests which map on-chain data with our normalised schemas. Furthermore, we have been working on developing a standard to allow external parties to compute for themselves the data our API produces and compare it to on-chain data, however this is a long term, on-going project. For now, we include links to alternate providers (like Tally or Agora) to offer peace of mind.
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For Snapshot data, we rely upon the official Snapshot APIs.
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We can explore adding Tenderly transaction simulations to provide additional context for users who are considering a vote including an executable transaction, if this is a priority for the DAO.
2d) Developer Support:
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We do not have a developer platform, however we are more than happy to give legitimate Compound developers access to our indexers and/or code to support governance-related activity.
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We also have a history of meaningfully open-sourcing relevant work with full documentation and tests, as demonstrated with ENS and Snapshot.
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We are in the process of outlining a plan to allow other governance-focused developers to embed their unique work natively within Lighthouse, however this will be dependent on venture funding. If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out to me directly (Arnold, Founder and CTO) on Telegram via
@x1a35e1.
2e) Threat Modeling:
We have specifically designed Lighthouse to act as a thin client on-top of Ethereum’s core cryptography. We use SIWE for all sessions and do not rely on emails or OAuth for identifying users.
This means the only surface area for attacks lies within the supply chain (external data sources, app stores, etc).
Communicating with users through proven technologies like APNS and FCM dramatically decreases risk compared to email or other communication channels, which are more prone to phishing attacks.
| Threat | Likelihood | Cost to Exploit | Impact Severity | Mitigations In Place | Monitoring & Alerting Practices |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poisoned Binary | Low–Medium | High (requires app signing or account compromise) | Critical | Only manually signed builds released through official stores (App Store / Play Store). | Manual verifications. Limited App Store access. |
| Signing attacks | Low | High | Critical | We currently rely on Reown to securely connect and relay transactions with mobile wallets. | We monitor all transactions facilitated by our apps. |
| Man-in-the-Middle | Low | Medium | High | All app APIs use HTTPS with cert pinning. Tokens are encrypted at rest and in transit. | N/A |
| Poisoned Push Certificates | Low | Medium–High | Critical | Certs stored off disk and periodically rotated.Restricted access. | Reliant on Apple/Google. |
| Impersonation (User Sessions) | Medium | Low–Medium | High | Access tokens are issued using SIWE. | We monitor all transactions facilitated by our apps. |
We are always open to suggestions and improvements in collaboration with the security council to improve our practices.
We employ an enterprise CI/CD pipeline with a robust set of E2E and unit tests. This allows us to catch any early conflicts in our isolated staging environment allowing us to move fast with peace of mind.
Section 3: Commercial Terms & Commitment
3a) Budget Request
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Given our stage of development and experimental nature of operations we are happy to extend a discount for our services so we can both grow and experiment in lockstep.
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We propose a $9500 USD per month commitment, for a total of $114,00 for the initial 12-month engagement. This is a 35% discount from what we would usually charge.
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We would cap any future renewal price increase to 30% as a good faith provision.
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We also request a nominal sum (TBD) to be determined by the CGWG to be strictly used for campaign incentives allocated to active voters at our discretion with oversight from the CGWG. This would be issued to a documented, isolated Safe for transparency.
3b) Milestone-Based Payment Structure
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We agree to meet and document the Platform Maintenance, Reliability, and Uptime KPIs requested.
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With regard to Governance Feature Usage, Impact, and Platform Adoption KPIs, as mentioned earlier, the average voter turnout on the last 20 governor proposals is ~45. With no Compound-specific marketing or outreach, we currently have 11% of this audience subscribed for notifications on Lighthouse.
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With a formal engagement, we would expect this to naturally increase. A conservative estimate would be a 100% increase per quarter.
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We like to set ambitious goals and work backwards. For example, how could we meaningfully activate and engage 0.01% of the holder base (~20k holders)? For context 7.3k users are following the COMP Snapshot space
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Our goal toward the end of this engagement period would be to meet and surpass these numbers giving Compound access to these users for the first time. Thus, we embrace a single north star metric of {n} users reachable.
We recognize that accountability is critical when a DAO entrusts a third party with important infrastructure.
We will maintain an open dialogue via the forum – posting regular updates and soliciting feedback. If at any point we fall short, we will work diligently (and publicly) to course-correct.
By adhering to these KPIs, Lighthouse aims to demonstrate measurable value: higher participation, robust uptime, timely delivery of improvements, and a well-informed community.
We are confident that our success can be transparently verified through these metrics, ensuring that Compound DAO’s engagement in Lighthouse as a VSP is continually justified by results.
3c) Offboarding, Data Portability, and Sunset Plans
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We would work with respective parties to explore all options for continuity.
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Everything we have designed will continue to work as a trustless system, so aspirationally the blockchain will be the historical data store.
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Commercial data such as push notification records, follow lists, open rates, etc, could be sanitized and exported for archival purposes.
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As mentioned above, one of our ongoing R&D projects is to ensure that core data such as voting activity and metadata can be indexed and archived in a well-known format. This will serve not only this purpose, but also aid ongoing academic research.
Lighthouse is excited about the opportunity to formally serve Compound DAO. Our mission is to make on-chain governance accessible and effective.
We look forward to working closely with Compound’s stakeholders to deliver a next-generation governance experience.
By supporting Lighthouse, Compound will gain a partner committed to innovation, community empowerment, and long-term transparency in governance.
We encourage all readers to download the Lighthouse Governance app and follow the Compound space to receive real-time push notification updates. Feedback welcome!