Compound (COMP)
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Price of Compound today in real time
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Historical price evolution of Compound
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Compound was born in 2017 when Robert Leshner, an economist and CFA with previous experience at HPM Partners, together with Geoffrey Hayes, founded Compound Labs in San Francisco. Their objective was to develop an algorithmic money market protocol on the Ethereum blockchain that would enable decentralised lending operations.
The protocol came to light in September 2018 with the launch of Compound v1 on Ethereum mainnet, enabling for the first time the possibility of lending and borrowing crypto assets directly on-chain without the need for traditional intermediaries. One year later, in November 2019, Compound v2 was deployed with significant improvements to the protocol architecture. In February 2020 the decentralised governance system was introduced, establishing the foundations for community management of the protocol.
The decisive moment arrived in June 2020 with the launch of the COMP token, an event that popularised the concept of yield farming in the DeFi ecosystem. This milestone drove exponential growth in total value locked (TVL), which rose from 150 million to 1,600 million dollars in three years. Growth continued until reaching a peak of 20,000 million dollars in TVL during 2021, the year in which Compound Treasury was also launched, aimed specifically at financial institutions.
In 2023 a significant change in leadership occurred when Robert Leshner resigned as CEO to found Superstate, a company focused on the tokenisation of traditional assets. The following year brought controversy when in July 2024 the DAO approved a contentious proposal that allocated 499,000 COMP tokens, valued at approximately 24 million dollars, to Golden Boyz's goldCOMP vault. The community denounced this decision as a governance attack, especially after it was revealed that the vote driver, known as Humpy, had similar precedents in other protocols such as Balancer and Aura Finance.
The most recent developments included approval in June 2025 of the creation of the Compound Foundation, a non-profit entity endowed with approximately 9 million dollars in COMP to support the ecosystem for 18 months. On 7th December 2025, the DAO took the decision to deprecate Compound V2 with 99.99% of votes in favour, pausing loans and minting in this version and setting the reserve factor to 100% for all its assets. Finally, on 18th April 2026, the protocol faced indirect consequences from the KelpDAO exploit, where 294 million dollars were stolen in rsETH. The attacker used these stolen tokens as collateral in Compound V3 to borrow WETH, generating bad debt and forcing the protocol to pause the affected markets.
Compound functions as a decentralised lending protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain that connects lenders and borrowers without traditional intermediaries. Lenders deposit their cryptocurrencies in shared liquidity pools and receive in return cTokens (such as cETH or cDAI) that represent their participation in the pool and accumulate interest automatically. Borrowers can access these funds provided they supply collateral of greater value than the requested loan, a mechanism known as overcollateralisation that protects the system against defaults.
The protocol uses an algorithmic system to adjust interest rates in real time according to the supply and demand of each specific asset. When the utilisation of a pool increases (more demand for loans), rates rise for both borrowers and lenders, creating incentives to balance the market. If the value of a borrower's collateral falls below the established minimum threshold, the protocol allows third-party actors called liquidators to intervene to close the position and protect the pool's funds.
The protocol's evolution is controlled by a decentralised governance system where holders of the COMP token can propose and vote on changes to the system's fundamental parameters. These decisions include modifications to required collateral factors, the mathematical models that determine interest rates and the incorporation of new assets into the protocol.
Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.