TL;DR
Use Sablier for Compound’s DAO vested token transfers to signal genuine intentions and help prevent governance attacks.
What is Sablier?
Sablier is a token distribution protocol available on multiple EVM chains, including Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Base, Scroll, etc. Our origins trace back to 2019, when we built the first ever implementation of money streaming on Ethereum. Although continuous payments are what we’re known for, today Sablier is capable of supporting any kind of distribution curve (e.g., weekly unlocks).
Hundreds of organizations like Uniswap, Shapeshift, Nouns DAO, and Maple and others use Sablier for vesting, payroll, airdrops, and more.
How does Sablier work?
The sender of a payment stream first deposits a specific amount of ERC-20 tokens in a contract. Then, the contract progressively allocates the funds to the recipient, who can access them as they become available over time. The payment rate is influenced by various factors, including the start and end times, as well as the total amount of tokens deposited.
For more details, please visit our website and our documentation.
Why should Compound use Sablier?
The current Sablier protocol itself is and will forever be free to use.
It’s a proven solution, with a median monthly TVL of ~$200M overin the past three years.
Sablier has been live on mainnet for five years now, and has never been hacked. Our codebase has been praised by many leaders in the industry for its quality.
Using Sablier to transfer funds to proposal creators ensures accountability. Sablier streams can be set as cancelable, in which case the stream creator has the ability to cancel the stream at any time., meaning This means stopping the stream and beingget refunded the tokens that the funds back which haven’t yet been paid out at that specific time.
This ensures that proposal creators have an incentive to deliver upon their work, becauseas if they don’t, the stream can be canceled. If Sablierit had been used in this proposal as a funding mechanism, it could have prevented what is currently considered by many as a governance attack.
Practical example: a proposal which includes funding passes and the funds are distributed through Sablier to the proposal creators over a 1-year period, linearly. The proposal includes work from the proposal creators over a 1-year period as well.
After 3 months, the Compound DAO notices that the proposal creators stopped working on the project and are no longer active. They cancel the stream and get 9 months worth of funds back (the amount that was left to be paid at that time), ensuring they only paid for work that was actually done.
Features that Sablier provides
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End-to-end user experience: we offer a platform for both senders and recipients to monitor and manage their outgoing and incoming streams. Every stream is associated with a unique link, which makes it easy to share the status of a stream with other people.
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Automation: setting up the streams only has to be done once. You provide the total duration of the stream (e.g., two years), and that’s all, no further actions are required from you. Treasury admins do not have to initiate monthly transactions anymore.
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Flexibility: the payment granularity can be continuous (every second), discrete (every day, every week, etc.), or even non-linear (custom unlocks, exponentials, etc.). Cliffs are supported, too.
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Bulk payments: it is possible to create up to ~100 streams with one transaction.
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Cancelability: streams can be either cancelable or non-cancelable. If cancelable, the sender can recover the unstreamed funds if an employee/contributor leaves or certain KPIs aren’t met while the stream is still running.
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Flexibility: streams can be created via our interface, by manually calling our contracts, or via our Safe multisig app, making Sablier an excellent fit for any set up.
Conclusion
Sablier is a protocol that has stood the test of time and that can provide DAOs like yours with a great web3-native solution for token vesting. We would love for you to become a Sablier user.
Thank you for considering us.
Technicals
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Deployments: our contract addresses can be found in the docs.
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TVL: between 2021 and 2024, the median TVL has been ~$200M. As of Monday 29 July 2024, the TVL is $215M according to DefiLlama.
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Security: audited by dozens of individuals and organizations. Sablier has never been hacked since its inception in 2019. We obsess over testing and security, and value code consistency and best practices. You can read about our coding practices here, and see some praise here, here and here.
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Control: Sablier is a permissionless protocol. There are some peripheral parameters that can be configured through a multisig, but the core part of the protocol is decentralized and non-upgradeable. Crucially, we have no access to user funds. See our governance page in our docs for more info.