Image Credit: Compound.com
Compound has approved a $52 million development program aimed at expanding the decentralized lending protocol into institutional credit and real-world assets. The two-year budget was approved by Compound DAO and will fund product development, integrations, and efforts to bring financial institutions onto the protocol.
The DAO approved the program through Proposal 582, which executed on May 10 with 1.88 million COMP voting in favor and none against or abstaining. Compound Foundation highlighted the program again on August 17 alongside a new leadership team focused on its institutional strategy.
$38 Million Depends on Development Milestones
The $52 million program allocates $28 million to operations, including engineering, integrations, risk management and marketing. Another $24 million is reserved for growth initiatives such as institutional onboarding, market seeding and expanding the network of risk curators.
Only $14 million is available to the Foundation initially. The remaining $38 million is held in a program reserve and will be released after defined milestones, including building the engineering team, completing a production V3 integration kit, onboarding a top-tier curator and launching a public V4 testnet.
Compound Shifts Focus Toward Institutional Credit
Compound’s V4 strategy is designed around becoming credit infrastructure that exchanges, asset managers, custodians, and other financial platforms can integrate. Planned features include support for tokenized real-world assets, standardized APIs and SDKs, and more flexible risk-management tools.
The Foundation said more than 10 partners are supporting V4 development, with over 20 institutional partners in onboarding discussions. Compound said:
“The growth strategy is deliberately infrastructure-led rather than retail-led.”
New Leadership Supports Institutional Push
Compound has also added executives with experience at Coinbase Custody, Anchorage Digital, NEAR Foundation and Maple Finance. Aaron Schnarch, previously CEO of Coinbase Custody and COO of Anchorage Digital, is serving as executive director of the Compound Foundation.
Compound currently has about $1.2 billion in total value locked, compared with roughly $14.8 billion for Aave. The $52 million program gives the protocol a larger development budget for institutional integrations and new credit infrastructure.
