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In the financial sector, there have been claims of governance attacks by community members who claim that a small group of people were able to acquire a large number of tokens on the open market and then force the proposal through the approval process.
Proposition 289, which would allocate 499,000 COMP tokens, or about $24 million worth of 5% of Compound’s treasury, to a yield-generating protocol designed by the “Golden Boys” for one year, passed Sunday with a vote of 682,191 to 633,636. Voting on the proposal began at 11:40 p.m. ET on Thursday and continued through the weekend.
But community members have argued that there is more to the vote totals than meets the eye. Michael Lewellen, an OpenZeppelin security solutions architect who serves as a security advisor to Compound Finance, said: X accountWe found a connection between several accounts accumulating COMP tokens on the open market and several proposals to convert COMP stakes into a goldCOMP product created by a group called Golden Boys.
In response to Lewellen’s security warning, several community members, including Wintermute Governance, Columbia Blockchain, Penn Blockchain, and StableLab, expressed similar concerns, especially as the group made two more attempts to pass the initially failed proposal.
“In my personal opinion, the actions of @Humpy and the Golden Boys could be considered a governance attack if they persist in trying to drain funds from the protocol in a way that is clearly against the will of all other Compound DAO representatives,” Lewellen posted after Proposal 289 was created. Lewellen could not immediately be reached for comment for this article.
But after Prop 289 passed, the apparent leader of the Golden Boys, who goes by the name Humpy, defended the proposal with a denunciation of Lewellen’s post. “‘Stealing funds’ is a false and misleading phrase, especially coming from a complex risk professional,” Humpy wrote. “The requested investments go through a trust set up with a series of restrictions that disallow theft/misappropriation of funds.”
Wintermute’s governance account questions the claim in a previous post that the ‘trust setup’ actually prevented the fund transfer, writing that “all forms of withdrawal actions (withdrawals) are under the sole control of GoldenBoyzMultisig. This means that the DAO cannot withdraw funds at its own discretion at any time. We believe that the DAO first votes to initiate a PHASE update and then GoldenBoyzMultisig calls the relevant withdrawal function.”
Brian Colligan, Founder and CEO of Compound’s official growth team, noted that even excluding risks, this opportunity doesn’t seem all that lucrative for Compound Finance. “Security concerns aside, our initial analysis suggests that there are far better POL opportunities leveraging partnerships between startup chains and DEXs. Most of these opportunities we are evaluating start at 15-20% APR, with some reaching 40% APR,” Colligan wrote on X.
While Humpy doesn’t appear to be acting entirely alone, at least one of the five members of the Golden Boys multisig claims to have been completely unaware of the proposal. “I’ve been on the multisig side for a long time, I didn’t know this was going to be voted on and I didn’t vote,” wrote X user Ogle, one of the four other members Humpy nominated to be governor of the multisig.
But Ogle was more measured in his response to the governance attack claims. “Based on my interactions over the last year, they have been selfish but good actors. I would be surprised if they were *intended* to harm anyone. My guess is that they are intended as a means to make money for everyone, including the group, but I’m just hearing about this stuff… so I don’t know any better than you,” Ogle wrote in response to the suggestion.
According to The Block’s Compound price page, the price of Compound tokens has fallen nearly 7% in the past 24 hours since the proposal passed.
A history of kidnapping?
Humpy is known to have been involved in similar attempts to exploit the DAO governance process for massive personal gain. In the long saga of 2022 Ethereum 
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-Based on Balancer 
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DeFi protocols are involved There was a long-running conflict with Humpty over a proposal that the whale was able to pass with a large number of votes.
“From April to December 2022, Balancer struggled to align Humpy’s activity with the DAO’s goals through incentives, and instead engaged in a cat-and-mouse game of governance to control the whales’ profit-seeking activities,” the Messari report explains.
Humpy’s group and the protocol eventually agreed to a peace treaty, but the battle involved Humpy controlling more than 50% of the vote and using multiple wallets for months to essentially unilaterally pass the proposal. Humpy could not immediately be reached by The Block for comment on this article.
Humpy was also accused of assault by SushiSwap’s ‘head chef’ Jared Grey in March of this year.. “As the process unfolded, Humpy’s plan became clear. episode 
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If his governance attack is successful, he will extract value from Sushi by using inflation to support the underperformance and distribution of his GOLD tokens.” Grey I posted in a thread describing the alleged attacks on X.
Gray also responded to the passage of Proposition 289, writing on Sunday on X Post that he was “saddened by the governance attacks perpetrated by Compound and Humpy.”
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