Compound Finance faces scrutiny over $24 million treasury allocation

Compound Finance, a prominent DeFi protocol, has faced significant backlash following the approval of a contentious proposal that directs 5% of its treasury—equivalent to 499,000 COMP tokens valued at roughly $24 million—to a lesser-known yield-bearing protocol called goldCOMP Vault.

According to CryptoSlate’s data, this allocation has adversely affected the COMP token, which dropped by approximately 5% in the past 24 hours, falling below $50.

Data from DeFillama further indicates that the incident caused investors to withdraw their assets from the protocol. Its total value locked has declined by over 2%, now standing at $3.15 billion. This drop is the largest among the top 20 DeFi protocols in the 24 hours.

What happened?

On July 28, Compound Finance DAO, the decentralized organization managing the crypto lending protocol, narrowly approved Proposal 289. This proposal allocated 5% of the treasury, or 499,000 COMP tokens valued at approximately $24 million, to a yield-bearing protocol.

The effort to pass this proposal began almost three months ago in May, when Humpy leading the “Golden Boys” group, introduced Proposal 247. This proposal sought a 92,000 COMP investment in goldCOMP’s DeFi vault for 5% annual returns but was rejected due to concerns about the multi-sig’s future actions and the lack of proper safeguards.

The Golden Boys then submitted Proposal 279, which had similar requests to Proposal 247 but introduced a Trust Setup instead of a multi-sig. This was intended to address concerns about oversight and clawback mechanisms. However, this attempt also failed.

Undeterred, the group submitted Proposal 289, which was ultimately approved. This proposal increased the COMP allocation to 499,000 tokens, used the TrustSetup, and updated the PHASE to allow the Golden Boys’ multi-sig call to invest in the TrustSetup contract.

Community reacts

While the move appears legal under the DAO’s rules, it has faced strong criticism from community members and experts who argued that it undermines decentralized governance, which was meant to reflect the collective interest rather than the agenda of a few influential entities.

Eskender Abebe, the head of product and strategy at Ethereum Name Service, pointed out that Humpy could pose a huge risk to Compound Finance with its substantial COMP portfolio. He wrote:

“Assuming they can direct the 600k tokens that voted FOR the proposal, and the additional 500k they received from the proposal, Humpy and the Golden Boys are now the number one Compound delegate, 4x larger than the [number] 2 delegate a16z and larger than the next 9 delegates combined!”

Meanwhile, community members also quickly pointed out that Humpy has a history of manipulating DAO governance processes to his advantage, using similar tactics on the Balancer protocol.

In March, Jared Grey, Head of SushiSwap, accused Humpy of attacking the SushiSwap protocol by accumulating SUSHI and leveraging governance to support his struggling GOLD token.

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