The Compound Foundation faces formal accusations from governance delegate Ugurmersin that it misappropriated 8.42 million DAI from Compound DAO reserves to purchase 344,780 COMP tokens and influence key governance decisions. The claims were published on the protocol’s official governance forum and center on Proposal 536, under which the funds were meant to be safeguarded as community operational capital and kept under exclusive DAO ownership, with speculative use explicitly prohibited.
According to the complaint and on-chain analysis, the DAI was swapped through exchange transactions—including a Binance-linked account according to Bitquery—and the resulting COMP arrived in a DAO reserve wallet on May 5 at 09:46 UTC. That was 58 minutes before a snapshot fixed voting power for Proposals 580 and 582. The multisig treasury signers allegedly delegated this voting power to the Compound Foundation immediately, enabling approval of a Treasury Management Committee structure and a Version 4 development program valued at $52 million.
Bitquery data shows 1,883,966 votes were cast for Proposal 582 out of 3,757,805 total delegated votes, giving supporters 50.1% of available voting power. Proposal 582 cleared the 50% threshold by only 0.1 percentage point. Without the 344,780 COMP transferred into the reserve wallet, supporters would have controlled 1,539,186 of 3,413,025 votes, or 45.1%, leaving enough voting power outside the bloc to defeat the plan. Tally recorded roughly 1.88 million votes for and none against, meaning the plan would still have met its 400,000-vote quorum without the reserve-wallet COMP.
The Compound Foundation responded on September 28, stating the conversion was consistent with the governance-continuity purpose of the reserve mandate, that the COMP remained DAO-owned, and that none of the assets had been spent on Foundation operations. Delegate Ugurmersin argues the conversion and delegation breached the mandate. The dispute also references collaboration with the Compound Growth Working Group, audit firm ChainSecurity, and security provider Certora.
Compound Finance had roughly $1.6 billion in total value locked, a market capitalization near $230 million, and COMP trading around $23 in late September 2026. The situation echoes a late-2025 Aave governance dispute, when Aave Chain Initiative founder Marc Zeller claimed wallets tied to Aave Labs influenced the “Aave Will Win” proposal. In a September 24 forum post, delegate AranaDigital defended Snapshot votes as a legitimate tool for operational efficiency. The Foundation had not released a broader official statement on the misappropriation claims at the time of reporting.
