Compound Labs at ETHDenver, WalletConnect Support, Vesper Beta Launch, Developer Community Call Recap
Compound Digest - January 29, 2021
Highlighting the best of the Compound ecosystem. For more updates, join the Compound community on Discord, Twitter, and Comp.xyz.
Compound Labs at ETHDenver
Compound Labs is proud to again be sponsoring the upcoming ETHDenver Conference, which will be held on Thursday, February 4th through Friday, February 12, 2021. ETHDenver is one of the largest annual hackathons and Ethereum conferences that usually takes place over one weekend in Denver, but this year will be held completely online. The Compound Labs team will be taking part in conference panels and lectures, as well as providing bounties for the hackathon. Look out for bounty announcements on Wednesday, February 3rd.
Please apply to participate in ETHDenver at ethdenver.com/apply and make sure you’ve joined the Compound Discord #development channel if you plan to participate in the hackathon. Feel free to let loose in the comments section of the ETHDenver forum post with ideas, projects, or protocol improvements that you would like to see built during the conference. See you there!
WalletConnect Support
With help from DeFi community members @transmissions11 and @mikedemarais, Compound Labs (finally) added support for Wallet Connect on the app.compound.finance interface! WalletConnect is a popular, open-source protocol for connecting various wallets to DeFi applications via QR codes, and support for it on the Compound interface was heavily requested by the community.
Compound users can now connect their favorite wallets, including Argent, Rainbow, Trust, imToken, and many others, when visiting the Compound interface. A special thanks to @transmissions11 for building the integration and @mikedemarais for raising the issue - this is truly #OpenSourceLife at its best!
Vesper Beta Launch
Vesper, a protocol for a yield strategy and aggregation, integrated Compound into its vDAI and vWBTC liquidity pools. The team recently deployed the vDAI test pool to public beta, and migrated the vWBTC pool from public beta to production. Both of these pools supply the underlying asset directly to Compound to earn interest, and in future, pools can be modified with more advanced yield strategies based on user risk preferences. In order to ensure the security of user funds, Vesper pools start in private testing, then move to public beta at https://app.vesperdev.net/ and then to production at https://app.vesper.finance/.
Developer Community Call Recap
The Compound community held a Developer Community Call on Wednesday to discuss ongoing protocol and application development. Below is a brief overview of the topics covered. You can listen to an audio recording of the call here or on your favorite podcast platform.
Peteris Erins shared an update on Gauntlet’s implementation of COMP vesting, which is currently being audited by Quantstamp. The latest implementation modifies the claimComp function to include the cooldown mechanism, instead of creating a new cooldown function and changing the API. Calling the claimComp function will automatically trigger a cooldown period for any accrued COMP, with the duration specified by governance. The Gauntlet team welcomes the community to provide feedback in the accompanying forum post and review the code in the pull request.
Yaron Velner provided an update on B.Protocol, a liquidation layer that sits on top of interest rate protocols like Compound and incentivizes a group of permanent liquidators to share guaranteed liquidations, as opposed to an ecosystem of liquidators who compete on high gas prices to gain an advantage. In this system, liquidators are able to provide cushion to an at-risk borrowing position, which gives them a priority on the position. When the borrowing position exceeds the specified collateral factor, B.Protocol liquidators that provided cushion can liquidate an equal share of the assets. This ‘fairness mechanism’ is described in more detail in B.Protocol’s most recent blog post, a slide deck shared during the call, and a forum post from November. B.protocol currently has a live integration with MakerDao and plans to go to mainnet with a Compound integration in February.
Getty Hill shared an idea for a medianizer that would aggregate prices from a variety of onchain and offchain sources, similar to what MakerDao uses. Getty notes that Coinbase being the only reporter in the Open Price Feed presents security concerns and limits the number of assets that the protocol can support. Paul Nattapatsiri, the CPO of Band Protocol, chimed in that his team would be excited to build the medianizer, as well as propose Band Protocol’s oracle system being added as a reporter to the OPF. Paul thinks that he will likely be able to share Band’s implementation of the medianizer on the next Community Developer Call, so stay tuned for any updates in the next couple of weeks. You can read more about the proposed medianizer in the forum post, and feel free to provide feedback on a price oracle that will hopefully benefit the entire DeFi ecosystem. It’s great to see community members pool their various skills to spearhead important upgrades to the protocol!
As a reminder, the community holds bi-weekly calls every other Wednesday at 9:30am PT / 4:30pm GMT. The next call will be on February 10th in the Compound Discord. Add the Compound Developers Google Calendar here. We hope to see you on the next call!
Governance Updates
Completed Votes
There have been no new governance votes since the last newsletter.
CAPs
Getty Hill’s Compound Autonomous Proposal to increase the WBTC collateral factor to 75% is gaining traction, with 65k of the 100k delegations necessary to create a formal governance proposal. Read the accompanying forum post for community analysis and consider delegating your support to this CAP.
Ongoing Discussions
See below for highlights from the Compound Community Forum, and join in the discussion:
Request for Protocol Improvement Ideas (and COMP Grant Eligibility) - @adambavosa calls for the Compound community to post and vote on their best ideas for protocol improvements.
Celo x Compound Finance & Compound Chain - @dimi lays out an execution plan and budget for integrating Celo and Compound Chain.
Rewarding Contributors - @massnomis, @wario, @TennisBowling and other community members continue the discussion around rewarding contributors to the protocol.
Grants Committee - @massnomis suggests forming a committee to conduct research and organize a protocol improvement pipeline.
COMP Distribution Incentives - @jmo provides a detailed update and rationale for adding a ‘cooldown’ period for all COMP rewards.
Snapshot voting to decide how much COMP should be granted - @TennisBowling created a snapshot poll for the community to decide how much COMP should be granted to comp.vote.
Borrow Cap Guardian Policy - @Sirokko suggests raising the borrow cap of the COMP market to 25M, since the market has already reached its borrowing cap.
Governor Bravo Development - @arr00 announces that Governor Bravo is now live on the Kovan test-net.
Be sure to either vote on proposals with your COMP, or delegate your COMP voting rights to a representative of your choice.
Markets Update
Current supply on Compound is at $5.8B from ~278k unique addresses, up from $4.5B a week ago. 28% of this supply volume is ETH, 23% is DAI, and 20% is USDC. (source).
Open borrowing is at $2.4B from 7.0k unique addresses. 44% of this borrowing volume is DAI, 39% is USDC, and 7% is USDT. (source).
For live figures please refer to our Markets page.
Image Source: IntoTheBlock
Links & Discussions
SkewAnalytics released a DeFi lending dashboard with data on interest rate protocols like Compound.
Opium Finance launched collateralized debt obligation products (CDOs) that offer risk tranching for cDAI.
O3 Wallet integrated Compound’s interest rate markets, which users can access through the discovery browser.
ARCx launched a yield farming program that uses cUSDC as a supported asset.