Compound DAO Used Protocol Reserves to Secure 50.1% Voting Majority for $52M Budget

On-chain data from Bitquery reveals that 344,780 COMP was transferred to a Compound DAO reserve wallet exactly 58 minutes before the snapshot fixed voting power for Proposal 582. The transfer gave supporters exactly 50.1% of the available voting power, ensuring they mathematically could not be outvoted on a $52 million V4 program budget allocation. Without the reserve-wallet COMP, the supporting bloc would have held 1,539,186 of a reduced 3,413,025-vote total (45.1%), though the plan ultimately recorded zero votes against and cleared its 400,000-vote quorum anyway. The $52 million budget designated $14 million for a Foundation-controlled operational wallet and $38 million for a Treasury Management Committee pool. Delegate ugurmersin alleges this conversion breached a prior reserve mandate, which placed 8.42 million DAI under Foundation stewardship while explicitly excluding discretionary trading. The Compound Foundation defended the move in a September 28 response, claiming the conversion fit its governance-continuity mandate and that the acquired COMP remained DAO-owned.