Compound Foundation has announced a new leadership team and a $52 million development program approved by the protocol’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), marking the largest such allocation in Compound’s history. The initiative is designed to reposition the DeFi lending protocol around institutional users and bring more traditional financial activity onchain.
The new leadership team includes Aaron Schnarch as executive director, Christopher Donovan as chief operating officer, Steven Liu as chief product officer and Leo Eikelman as chief technology officer. Their backgrounds span traditional finance and digital-asset infrastructure, with additional team members joining from firms including Anchorage Digital, HSBC, Broadridge Financial and Maple Finance.
Compound said the program will support a new product roadmap focused on native real-world asset (RWA) capabilities, improved capital efficiency and integration tools that allow banks, asset managers, exchanges and fintech companies to incorporate onchain lending into their own products. The first institutional-grade products are expected to be introduced in the coming weeks.
Founded in 2018, Compound helped establish decentralized lending as a core part of the crypto economy. The protocol says it has processed approximately $480 billion in deposits and borrowing volume since launch and has recorded no bad debt.
The strategy comes as Compound faces a significantly smaller market footprint than at the height of the previous DeFi cycle. Assets locked in the protocol have declined to about $1.2 billion from a peak of roughly $12 billion in September 2021. Meanwhile, rival Aave has expanded to approximately $14.8 billion in total value locked, according to DeFiLlama data cited in the source material.
The broader DeFi market has also weakened, with sector-wide total value locked falling by more than a third since the beginning of the year to around $70 billion. The decline has been linked to the wider crypto-market correction, lower yields and several major protocol exploits. At the same time, tokenized real-world assets remain a major growth area, supporting Compound’s decision to target institutional demand.
The company’s new direction reflects a broader shift in DeFi’s potential customer base. Retail participation has declined from its earlier peaks, while financial institutions are increasingly exploring blockchain-based settlement, execution and lending infrastructure. Compound’s leadership argues that existing DeFi products often do not meet the compliance, technical and operational standards expected by traditional financial institutions.
The $52 million allocation is intended to address those gaps by combining product development with institutional expertise. For Compound, the move represents a transition from pioneering retail-focused DeFi lending toward building infrastructure capable of supporting institutional credit and onchain financial services.
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