Compound Extends DeFi Ethos to Itself, Launches Governance Token

Decentralized finance platform Compound is going ahead and decentralizing itself.

In that spirit, Compound is launching the testnet of its experimental governance platform today, complete with a trial version of its COMP governance token.

Launched in late 2018, Compound has held steady as a top-three DeFi dapp on ethereum basically as long as DeFi Pulse has been tracking such things.

Compound currently offers lending in eight different assets and accounts for about 15 percent of all the ETH locked up in DeFi, lately hovering at around a billion dollars.

Once that's done, token holders will run Compound, not the company.

"Compound is more like a financial application and infrastructure layer than a blockchain. The accessibility of proposing changes to it is going to be much much more accessible," Leshner said.

From here, Compound will focus on building services that run on Compound, much like the company Hadoop does with big-data software.

Anyone will be able to propose changes to Compound, but they won't go to a vote unless 1 percent of the total token supply backs the measure.

Then the code change won't kick in for another two days, just to give users of Compound time to close out their positions if they think the change is against their interests.

When the governance system first goes live, it will only be in the hands of Compound's supporters and team.