Compound Foundation Names Coinbase And Anchorage Alumni To Run $52 Million Institutional Push

Compound Foundation named four executives recruited from Coinbase Custody, Anchorage Digital, the NEAR Foundation and Maple Finance to spend a $52 million budget on turning the 2018 lending protocol into credit infrastructure for banks and asset managers.

The hires arrive with Compound at roughly a twelfth of Aave's size. Compound V3 and V2 hold about $1.23 billion in deposits combined, according to DefiLlama, against $14.8 billion at Aave and $8.06 billion at Morpho Blue. What the Foundation is selling institutions is operating history: running since 2018, the most forked codebase in DeFi, and, by the Foundation's account, zero bad debt since launch. That last record held through November 2025, when Compound paused withdrawals in three stablecoin markets on risk manager Gauntlet's recommendation to head off bad debt as Elixir's deUSD collapsed.

$38 Million Behind Milestones

COMP holders approved the money in Proposal 582, which executed on May 10 with 1.88 million COMP in favor and nothing against or abstaining. Turnout ran more than double the 600,000 to 850,000 COMP that routine risk-parameter votes drew over the same period.

The funding proposal splits $52 million across two years: $28 million for operations, including engineering, integrations, risk and marketing, and $24 million for growth, including institutional onboarding, market seeding and curator expansion. Only $14 million went to the Foundation's own multisig. The remaining $38 million sits in a Program Reserve controlled by a 5-of-7 Treasury Management Committee multisig, released against milestones: a staffed engineering team and a production V3 integration kit for the first tranche, a tier-one curator onboarding for the second, a public V4 testnet for the third. Undeployed budget earns yield for the DAO until certification.

The DAO created that committee in Proposal 580, executed two minutes later, pulling roughly $18.95 million in V2 reserves and $6.94 million in V3 surplus reserves into treasury escrow alongside about $32 million already sitting in Aera and Avantgarde vaults.

"DeFi is a remarkable innovation, however, it has achieved limited institutional adoption," said Aaron Schnarch, the Foundation's new Executive Director, in a statement. "We know the demand is there, but current product offerings fall short of meeting the traditional finance bar, especially as it pertains to compliance and technical requirements."

Nine Of Eleven ETFs

Schnarch was most recently COO of Anchorage Digital and before that CEO of Coinbase Custody. The Foundation credits him with securing 11 of 12 U.S. bitcoin ETF custody mandates. Coinbase said in July 2024 that it was "custodian powering 9 of 11 spot bitcoin ETFs," having started as custodian for eight of the funds that began trading in January 2024. At Anchorage, Schnarch oversaw the bank's role in the Global Dollar Network, the Paxos-led USDG consortium launched in November 2024 with Robinhood, Kraken, Galaxy Digital, Bullish and Nuvei.

The other three appointments:

• Christopher Donovan, COO. Former COO and General Counsel of the NEAR Foundation, where he helped launch NEAR Intents, the cross-chain liquidity protocol the Foundation says has cleared more than $20 billion in volume. Previously a partner at Outlier Ventures.
• Steven Liu, Chief Product Officer. Former Head of Product at Maple Finance, which the Foundation says he scaled from $500 million to $5 billion in assets under management. Maple currently holds about $2.42 billion in TVL, per DefiLlama. Earlier roles at Anchorage Digital, Amazon and HSBC.
• Leo Eikelman, CTO. More than four years in engineering leadership at Coinbase Institutional, where he led development of Prime Onchain Wallet. Earlier roles at Amazon and InvestorCOM.

The Foundation told delegates in its June program update that it had appointed a CTO from "tier-one digital asset and big-tech companies," hired two protocol engineers and added a non-executive director, without naming them at the time.

Permissioned Vaults, Tokenized Equities

What the $52 million builds is set out in the Foundation's V4 roadmap, published in January: an integration suite letting brokerages and fintechs embed Compound lending, tokenized equities accepted as collateral against 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 with authority to reallocate liquidity in real time.

Some of it lands before V4. The July update put the V3 integration kit at development complete, the Institutional Comet in launch testing and a new liquidation engine in controlled testing. The Foundation launched its own front end at compound.xyz on June 29, where a Compound Institutional Market is now taking early-access signups. The Foundation says the first institutional product ships within weeks.

Compound is arriving after its two larger competitors. Aave Labs launched Horizon for institutions borrowing stablecoins against tokenized assets, and Morpho raised $175 million to expand curated lending.

Ninety-Eight Percent Below Peak

Compound's own site puts cumulative deposits and loans at about $480 billion and all-time loans at $57 billion. Current activity is smaller: V3 generated about $1.77 million in fees over the past 30 days and $29.1 million over the past year, per DefiLlama.

TVL peaked above $12 billion in November 2021 and fell to about $1.4 billion by February 2026, when The Defiant examined the decline. Founder Robert Leshner left in June 2023. Proposal 62 shipped a bug in October 2021 that over-distributed COMP rewards, costing the DAO tens of millions of dollars. In July 2024, Compound offered COMP stakers 30% of protocol reserves to defuse what delegates called a governance attack by the whale known as Humpy, who had pushed through a vote to move roughly $24 million of treasury COMP into a vault his associates controlled.

COMP traded near $16.26 on Monday, up less than 1% over 24 hours, per CoinGecko, for a market cap around $163 million. The token sits about 98% below its May 2021 high of $854.45.

Delegates Want Spend Data

Delegates have started pressing for numbers the Foundation has not yet published. In the June thread, Tane asked for capital deployment broken out by operational category "as originally committed in the funding proposal," Curia questioned how an R&D Comet initiative fits Year 1 milestones, and DAOplomats proposed a standard monthly template covering milestone delivery, hiring and spend-to-date. The Foundation agreed to include aggregated deployment data going forward. Neither the June nor July update disclosed spending.

Before the vote, delegate compw1n challenged the growth plan's curator selection, arguing performance data favored Steakhouse Finance and Sentora over Gauntlet, whose role in Compound governance delegates have contested before. No delegate voted against the budget.