UNI Market Launches, ETHOnline Hackathon Begins, Protocol Contribution Guide, Governance Updates

Compound Digest - October 7, 2020

Oct 8, 2020

Highlighting the best of the Compound ecosystem. For more updates, join the Compound community on Discord, Twitter, and Comp.xyz.

Uniswap (UNI) Market Launches

Following the successful voting period and execution of Proposal 25 on October 3, UNI is now an active market on Compound. This is the first new market since the addition of USDT in May and is initially deployed with the JumpRateModelV2 interest rate model, a reserve factor of 20%, and a collateral factor of 60%.

UNI is the governance token for the decentralized exchange Uniswap, and marks the first time that a governance token has been supported on Compound. Its cToken contract, cUNI, includes a single new function; the ability to Delegate the UNI held inside the contract to an address specified by Governance. The contract has been initialized as undelegated, but in the future Compound Governance will be able to participate in Uniswap Governance using the tokens held in the cUNI contract.

In addition, the cUNI market was created with a 2.0 million UNI borrowing cap, which was reached just a few days after market launch. The community is now polling for interest in raising or removing this borrowing cap.

Visit app.compound.finance today to earn interest on, or borrow UNI!

ETHOnline Hackathon Begins

Compound Labs is sponsoring this year’s ETHOnline Hackathon, and is offering prizes for the below categories.

Bounty 1 of 3: Best Use of Compound.js ($1,500 cUSDC Prize)

Most original project that uses the Compound.js SDK
See docs for code examples
ETHOnline code workshop featuring Compound.js on YouTube

Bounty 2 of 3: Best New Governance Tooling ($1,500 cUSDC Prize)

Application, SDK, API, or other that improves the tooling and process for Compound’s on-chain Governance system
See GitHub for code examples

Bounty 3 of 3: Compound Protocol Improvement Proposal ($2,500 cUSDC Prize)

Best Proposed Improvement to the Compound Protocol
See this guide, “A Walkthrough of Contributing to the Compound Protocol”
The final form of a submission for this bounty can be an actual on-chain proposal submitted to the Compound Governance system

The Compound Labs team is available to provide guidance on anything technical, design, or business-related, and can be reached on the ETHOnline Discord Server in the #sponsor-compound room.

You can also learn about how to build on Compound in this pre-recorded kickoff workshop.

Protocol Contribution Guide

Compound Labs’ Developer Relations lead recently published A Walkthrough of Contributing to the Compound Protocol, a step-by-step guide to proposing and implementing changes to the Compound smart contracts. The guide takes developers through the process of modifying source code, deploying a patch on-chain, and creating a governance proposal for community voting and execution.

One of the most significant advantages of decentralized applications is the ability to crowdsource knowledge and expertise from a global community. Compound’s long-term success will depend on this type of community participation, and we invite you to directly make your voice heard through code!

See developer guides in the developer section on Medium, check out the developer documentation, and join the discussion in the Compound Community Forum as well as the Compound Discord.

Governance Updates

Completed Votes

Since the last newsletter, Proposals 24 and 25 passed through Compound Governance with wide voting margins.

Proposal 24: Set WBTC Collateral Factor to 60%

Status: Executed October 1st, 2020
Proposer: Getty Hill (CAP)
Voting Results: 736,937 For and 5,015 Against
Summary: Following a discussion of the rapidly increasing demand for WBTC, Proposal 24 increased the WBTC Collateral Factor from 40% to 60%. This proposal was first submitted as a Compound Autonomous Proposal (CAP), marking the first time a CAP was successfully passed through governance - requiring only 100 delegated COMP from its creator.

Proposal 25: Add UNI Support

Status: Executed October 3rd, 2020
Proposer: Geoffrey Hayes
Voting Results: 537,376 for and 1 Against
Summary: UNI, the governance token for the decentralized exchange Uniswap, was added to Compound. Prior to the formal governance proposal, Compound CTO Geoff Hayes detailed the process for deploying new markets to Compound using UNI as an example. This process may serve as a template for community members looking to add support for other tokens.

Ongoing Discussions

See below for highlights from the Compound governance forum, and join in the discussion:

Setup community cUNI Voting - @arr00 suggests a process for cUNI holders to vote in Uniswap governance through the Compound community multisig.
YFI Listing Proposal - @mrhen suggests the community take a deeper look at adding support for YFI since Coinbase Pro listed the token and it can now be included in the Open Price Feed.
Adding COMP as an asset? - In preparation for a formal governance proposal, @arr00 has deployed the cCOMP contract with the JumpRateModelV2 interest rate model.
Upgrade COMP distribution model. (Incentivized pools) - @Sirokko proposes adding individual COMP distribution parameters in each market, to discourage extractive yield-farming in markets like DAI.
TrueUSD Listing Proposal - @rafael.cosman uses recent data from other protocols to make the case for why TUSD would be a valuable addition to Compound.

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 $1.8B from ~37k unique addresses. In the past seven days, approximately $557M (gross) was added to the protocol, in 3.8k transactions. 40% of this volume was USDC, 33% was ETH, 21% was DAI, and 3% was USDT (source).

Open borrowing is at $1.1B from 5.4k unique addresses. In the past seven days, approximately $110M (gross) was borrowed from Compound in 970 transactions. 62% of this volume was DAI, 18% was USDC, 10% was USDT, and 8% was ETH (source).

For live figures please refer to our Markets page.

Links & Discussions

Swipe, a debit card issuer owned by Binance, has integrated Compound to offer users instant access to borrowing from their physical and virtual LendFi Visa cards.
In light of the CFTC and DOJ serving charges against BitMEX, Compound Labs CEO, Robert Leshner, explains why regulators may embrace the transparency and accountability of DeFi protocols.
In an interview with Coindesk, Plaid’s head of U.K., Keith Grose, describes the company’s vision for crypto and reveals that they are already working with DeFi firms like Dharma and Teller Finance, both of which have integrated the Compound protocol.
Economists at Imperial College London published DeFi Protocols for Loanable Funds: Interest Rates, Liquidity and Market Efficiency, a paper that analyzes interest rates across Compound and other DeFi protocols.
The Block’s Mika Honkasalo has published 37 DeFi charts that show the growth and evolution of popular protocols like Compound.
Compound Labs Business Development Associate, Nick Martitsch, published analytics on the growth and health of the Compound protocol in Issue #40 of Our Network.
Venus, a newly launched money market protocol on Binance Smart Chain, disclosed in their whitepaper that they will base their governance system off of Compound’s voting process.