Compound reserves bought $52M in COMP before vote

On May 5 at 09:46 UTC, 344,780 COMP-about $52 million at the time-arrived in a DAO reserve wallet that had delegated its votes to the Compound Foundation, on-chain records show. The deposit occurred 58 minutes before a voting snapshot for Proposal 582 that fixed delegated voting power.

The additional COMP raised the block of supporters backing Proposal 582 to 50.1% of delegated voting power at the snapshot. Without the reserve tokens, that group would have held about 45.1% of delegated votes, according to on-chain reconstructions.

Proposal 582 passed with roughly 1,883,966 votes in favor and no votes recorded against, out of about 3,757,805 total delegated votes at the snapshot. The vote met a roughly 400,000-vote quorum; the recorded result does not change if the reserve-wallet COMP is excluded from the tally.

The approved V4 program budget totals about $52 million. The plan allocates $14 million to a Foundation-controlled operational wallet and $38 million to a Treasury Management Committee pool, with disbursements tied to milestone targets.

An earlier governance measure, Proposal 536, placed about 8.42 million DAI of legacy reserves under Foundation stewardship for protocol operations and governance continuity. That vote kept the assets DAO-owned and restricted discretionary trading or spending for Foundation-specific expenses.

A forum delegate, posting on Sept. 27 under the name ugurmersin, alleged the conversion and the delegation to the Foundation violated the reserve mandate and exceeded limits set when the reserves were placed under stewardship. The Foundation replied on Sept. 28, writing that the conversion was consistent with the mandate’s governance-continuity purpose, that the COMP remained DAO-owned, and that no reserve assets had been spent on Foundation operations.

Blockchain tracing links the reserve purchase to a Binance account, but public chain data does not identify which external account funded the withdrawal used to acquire the COMP. The provenance questions are part of the governance dispute.

Subtracting the 344,780 COMP from the reserve wallet reduces the supporters’ counted votes to about 1,539,186 and lowers the total delegated vote pool to roughly 3,413,025, which would place the supporters at 45.1% of delegated power. The numerical change would have left enough voting power outside the supporters’ bloc to permit opposition to defeat the plan, though the recorded vote showed no opposing votes.

Delegates remain divided over whether the Foundation had the authority to convert reserves into voting tokens under the stewardship limits established by past governance votes. The conversion, its funding path, and the interpretation of the reserve mandate continue to be contested within the DAO.