Should Compound Retroactively Airdrop Tokens to Early Users?

Here’s my personal story.

I started participating in the community by doing research during the DAI liquidation event of last year. I would summarize my contributions thus:

  1. Figuring out a considerable amount of the capital liquidated was concentrated on very few accounts that were also doing recursive farming Compensation Proposal: Distribute COMP to Affected Users in the DAI Liquidations - #23 by wario

  2. A compensation proposal that attempted to compensate regular users liquidated without compensating “recursive farmers”
    Compensation Proposal: Distribute COMP to Affected Users in the DAI Liquidations - #73 by wario

  3. During the course of the research I developed a simple public dapp that anyone can use to get an idea of what arbitrary accounts have been doing on Compound https://mariorz.github.io/compcharts/

The research was done because I thought it interesting and useful, not considering there might a grant possibility. But members of the community approached me about receiving a retroactive grant when the grant programs was first launched. This was unexpected but well received on my side of course. However I did not hear about this again and in the end grants where awarded retroactively to other contributors.

After this I asked on the #grants channel on Discord if I should apply for a retroactive grant for this work. And was told by @sukernik that retroactive grants were something to be avoided in his opinion (even though they had been awarded previously and will probably be awarded in this instance as well).
Screenshot from 2021-11-04 10-21-23

To make matters worse, recently passed proposal #59 ended up bailing out the industrial recursive farming operations investigated, only 2 of these operations receiving the great majority of the compensation when most of the community was not paying attention.

Looking back I think that perhaps some important interests were not aligned with the investigation into what the bailed out industrial farmers were doing. Needless to say, the whole affair has been a disincentive to participation in the protocol. Just to be clear, I will not receive any rewards given the dates proposed, but still think the idea of retroactive rewards is something to support.

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