Compound Foundation has hired four senior executives from Coinbase Custody, Anchorage Digital, the NEAR Foundation and Maple Finance as it begins deploying a two-year, $52 million budget approved by the Compound DAO. The effort is aimed at repositioning the long-running DeFi lending protocol as credit infrastructure for banks, brokerages, fintechs and asset managers.

The hires come as Compound tries to regain ground in onchain lending. Combined deposits across Compound V2 and V3 stand at about $1.23 billion, far below Aave's $14.8 billion and Morpho Blue's $8.06 billion. The Foundation's pitch to institutions centers on Compound's operating history since 2018, its widely forked codebase, and what it describes as a record of zero bad debt since launch, though the protocol did pause withdrawals in three stablecoin markets in November 2025 on Gauntlet's recommendation during the deUSD collapse.

DAO-approved budget and milestone controls

COMP holders authorized the funding in Proposal 582, which executed on May 10 with 1.88 million COMP voting in favor and no votes against or abstaining. According to the source article, turnout was more than twice the level of routine governance votes.

The plan allocates $28 million to operations over two years, covering engineering, integrations, risk and marketing, and another $24 million to growth initiatives including institutional onboarding, market seeding and curator expansion. Only $14 million was sent to the Foundation's own multisig, while the remaining $38 million was placed in a Program Reserve controlled by a 5-of-7 Treasury Management Committee multisig.

That reserve is meant to be released against milestones. The first tranche depends on a staffed engineering team and a production V3 integration kit, the second on onboarding a tier-one curator, and the third on a public V4 testnet. Any undeployed funds continue earning yield for the DAO until they are certified for release.

Who the Foundation hired

The Foundation named Diogo Schnarch as CEO. He was most recently chief operating officer at Anchorage Digital and earlier served as CEO of Coinbase Custody. The Foundation says he helped secure 11 of 12 U.S. bitcoin ETF custody mandates, while Coinbase has said it acted as custodian for 9 of 11 spot bitcoin ETFs.

Christopher Donovan joins as COO after serving as COO and general counsel at the NEAR Foundation, where the Foundation says he helped launch NEAR Intents. Steven Liu becomes chief product officer following his role as head of product at Maple Finance, which the Foundation says he helped scale from $500 million to $5 billion in assets under management. Leo Eikelman was named CTO after more than four years in engineering leadership at Coinbase Institutional, where he led development of Prime Onchain Wallet.

The Foundation had previously told delegates in a June update that it had hired a CTO, added two protocol engineers and brought on a non-executive director, but it had not identified those executives at the time.

Institutional roadmap takes shape

The spending plan follows a V4 roadmap published in January. That roadmap outlines an integration suite intended to let brokerages and fintechs embed Compound lending, support for tokenized equities as collateral for stablecoin borrowing, permissioned vaults with KYC and AML controls, portfolio-aware risk management with dynamic loan-to-value calibration, and a third-party risk manager able to reallocate liquidity in real time.

Some work is scheduled to arrive before V4. In its July update, the Foundation said the V3 integration kit was development complete, Institutional Comet was in launch testing, and a new liquidation engine was in controlled testing. It also launched its own front end at compound.xyz on June 29, where a Compound Institutional Market is now collecting early-access signups.

The Foundation has said its first institutional product will launch within weeks. The push comes after Aave Labs introduced Horizon for institutions using tokenized assets as borrowing collateral, and after Morpho raised $175 million to expand curated lending.

Performance, setbacks and governance scrutiny

Compound's website lists roughly $480 billion in cumulative deposits and loans and $57 billion in all-time loans. More recent activity is much smaller: DefiLlama data cited in the source puts V3 fee generation at about $1.77 million over the last 30 days and $29.1 million over the past year. TVL peaked above $12 billion in November 2021 and had fallen to about $1.4 billion by February 2026.

The protocol has also had a difficult stretch. Founder Robert Leshner left in June 2023. A 2021 governance proposal introduced a bug that over-distributed COMP and cost the DAO tens of millions of dollars. In July 2024, Compound offered COMP stakers 30% of protocol reserves to resolve a governance conflict involving the whale known as Humpy after a vote redirected roughly $24 million in treasury COMP to a vault controlled by his associates.

Delegates are now asking for more detailed reporting on how the new budget is being spent. Comments on the Foundation's June update requested category-by-category deployment data, clarification on how some initiatives fit Year 1 milestones, and a standard monthly template covering hiring, milestone delivery and cumulative spending. The Foundation agreed to provide aggregated deployment data in future updates, but neither its June nor July report disclosed spending figures.

Source: thedefiant.io