Compound.js, Governance Updates, Autonomous Proposals, OKEx Integration
Compound Digest - September 10, 2020
Highlighting the best of the Compound ecosystem. For more updates, join the Compound community on Discord, Twitter, and Comp.xyz.
Compound.js in Beta Testing
Compound Labs has launched the beta version of Compound.js, a JavaScript SDK for Ethereum and the Compound Protocol. Rather than programming in Solidity, developers can use Compound.js to interact with Compound’s smart contracts using JavaScript or Node.js.
Key protocol methods like mint, redeem, borrow, and repayBorrow can now be executed using simple 1-liners, making it easier and faster for developers to build applications on top of Compound. In addition to Compound methods, developers can also make generic Ethereum read and write calls to any smart contract.
You can read more about Compound.js in the Medium announcement, view the source code on GitHub and NPM, and review developer documentation on the Compound website.
Governance Updates
Up for Voting
Proposal 22: New Feature: Borrow Caps
Submitted by community member @blck on behalf of @Arr00, Proposal 22 would implement a new Comptroller with a “Borrow Caps” feature. This proposal has been discussed at length in the community forums -- see this post for full context.
Borrow caps would enable governance to set limits for total borrowing in each market. For each new borrow request in a market, the new total borrows would be checked against the borrow cap and revert if the new total borrows is too high.
Borrow caps are intended to be used as a safeguard for the protocol, for example to defend against “infini-mint” risk, where a collateral position is inappropriately given a value approaching infinity, and a bad actor tries to borrow all $300 million of Ether currently held in the protocol.
This proposal does not actually implement any borrow caps -- usage of the feature must be set through future proposals.
Separately but importantly, this is the first Compound governance proposal to include a reward to the developer of the proposal’s code, and would transfer @Arr00 approximately $5,000 worth of SAI out of the protocol’s reserves.
The vote for this proposal ends on September 11 at approximately 10:30pm UTC.
Completed Votes
Since the last newsletter, Proposal 21 has passed with 85% support from the community:
Proposal 21: Reduce COMP emissions by 20%
Status: Executed August 31st, 2020
Proposer: Gauntlet
Voting Results: 1,119,629 For and 195,969 Against
Summary: CompSpeed has been lowered from to 0.176 COMP per Ethereum block. This lower emission rate helps ensure that the protocol has a large reserve of COMP to incentivize positive community and user participation.
Ongoing Discussions
See below for highlights from the Compound governance forum, and join in the discussion:
“Community Gas Fund” - @arr00 suggests the creation of a community gas fund funded by SAI reserves, in order to subsidize new contract deployments and gas-less governance voting.
“Lower Proposal Threshold to 100 COMP” - @lay2000lbs suggests lowering the governance proposal threshold from 100k COMP to 100 COMP, which has sparked a vibrant discussion around empowering more users to participate in governance.
“Financially Incentivizing voting/voting delegation” - @odette introduces the concept of COMP emissions going to governance participants.
“Update cUSDC interest rate model” - @arr00 suggests updating the cUSDC interest rate model to match the current cDAI and cUSDT interest rate models.
“YFI Listing Proposal” - @paraficapital suggests adding YFI as a supported market on Compound.
Be sure to either vote on proposals with your COMP, or delegate your COMP voting rights to a representative of your choice.
Introducing Autonomous Proposals
Compound Labs has released a new tool to make it easier for community members to gather votes for a proposed protocol upgrade: Compound Autonomous Proposals (CAPs).
In the current governance system users need 100k delegated COMP to submit a formal proposal into the voting process - which can be a daunting ask for many community members. With this tool users can now create a CAP with only 100 COMP. They can then collect votes to be delegated to the CAP itself, and once the CAP has reached the 100k delegated COMP threshold it can be submitted as a formal proposal into the governance voting process.
Here is the first-ever Autonomous Proposal: Set Pause Guardian to Community Multi-Sig. It needs >100,000 delegated votes to be submitted as a formal proposal. To delegate to it, visit the Vote page of the Compound App, and delegate your votes to the address of the CAP (0x0cde9622b23ababfccef9755b5f7c9e759ef4820).
You can read more about Autonomous Proposals in the announcement on Medium. We’re excited to see what the Compound community will build and propose with a lower barrier to entry for governance!
OKEx Launches Compound Integration
OKEx, one of the top spot and derivative exchanges by volume, has integrated Compound to allow users to earn interest on all of the assets that the protocol supports (BAT, DAI, ETH, USDC, USDT, WBTC, ZRX). The Earn product features no minimum holding period aside from 1-day redemption processing, and additional COMP bonuses for certain assets.
OKEx has also built a flexible borrowing product that will launch in the near future, marking the first time a major exchange will have integrated Compound’s borrowing functionality.
If you are a developer interested in adding Compound interest rates to your application, exchange, custody offering, or any other product, please feel free to reach out to our team for technical guidance and support.
Markets Update
The current supply on Compound is at $1.3B from ~36k unique addresses. In the past seven days, approximately $633M (gross) was added to the protocol, in 7k transactions. 40% of this volume was USDC, 28% was ETH, 27% was DAI, and 3% was USDT (source).
Open borrowing is at $671M from 5.2k unique addresses. In the past seven days, approximately $168M (gross) was borrowed from Compound in 1.5k transactions. 57% of this volume was DAI, 24% was USDC, 12% was ETH, and 3% was BAT (source).
For live figures please refer to our Markets page.
Links & Discussions
Multis shared a map of the next-generation financial system, with Compound powering the core crypto infrastructure.
Binance Academy published a report on the basic functionality and purpose of the Compound Protocol.
Frontier Wallet launched a Compound integration inside of the mobile application, giving users access to Compound by linking Trust Wallet, imToken, Fortmatic, Metamask Mobile, or Coinbase Wallet.
One day after the release of Autonomous Proposals, developer Dennison Bertram shared a fork called “COMP - RFP”, which intends to create an incentivized bounty market to crowdfund the creation of Compound governance proposals.