Compound DAO reserves were used to acquire 344,780 COMP shortly before a key governance vote, giving the proposal’s supporters a narrow majority and prompting a dispute over whether the transaction exceeded the Foundation’s mandate.
According to CryptoSlate, blockchain analytics provider Bitquery identified the tokens arriving in a Compound DAO reserve wallet at 09:46 UTC on May 5—58 minutes before the voting-power snapshot for Proposal 582. The wallet had delegated its votes to the Compound Foundation, which supported the proposal.
The transaction has become central to an argument about how DAO-controlled assets may be used. Delegate ugurmersin alleged on Sept. 27 that converting reserves into COMP and delegating the resulting voting power breached the mandate governing those assets. The Foundation rejected that interpretation in a response dated Sept. 28.
How the reserve tokens affected the vote
Bitquery counted 3,757,805 total delegated votes at the May 5 snapshot. Supporters of Proposal 582 ultimately cast 1,883,966 votes, representing 50.1% of the available voting power. Because the bloc held more than half of the total, the proposal could not have been defeated even if every other delegate had voted against it.
The impact of the reserve-wallet tokens becomes clearer when they are removed from the calculation. Without the 344,780 COMP, the same supporters would have controlled 1,539,186 votes out of a reduced total of 3,413,025, or 45.1%. That would have left enough voting power outside the bloc to defeat the measure.
Tally recorded approximately 1.88 million votes in favor and none against. The reserve-backed votes were therefore significant to the balance of power, although the proposal would still have passed the 400,000-vote quorum without them.
What Proposal 582 approved
The $52 million figure refers to an approved Version 4 program budget. Proposal 582 allocated $14 million to a Foundation-controlled operational wallet and $38 million to a Treasury Management Committee pool, with releases linked to milestones.
The earlier Proposal 536 had placed about 8.42 million DAI in legacy protocol reserves under Foundation stewardship for protocol operations and governance continuity. Those assets remained DAO-owned, while discretionary trading and Foundation-specific expenses were excluded.
The disagreement is whether buying COMP with those reserves, and then using the tokens in governance, fell within that purpose. The Foundation said the action was consistent with the mandate’s governance-continuity objective, that the COMP remained owned by the DAO, and that no assets were used for Foundation operations. The source material also notes that the connection between the spent reserves and the COMP purchase runs through a Binance account; public blockchain data cannot establish the funding account behind the withdrawal.
Moneyiar market picture
Moneyiar data recorded COMP at $23.8186759137 at 22:04 on Sept. 25, 2026, down 0.88% over 24 hours but up 13.75% over seven days. Compound was ranked No. 130 by market capitalization in the source material. These market figures describe price performance and do not resolve the governance dispute.
