Compound pauses use of four tokens as collateral

Compound (COMP/USD), an Ethereum-based decentralised lending protocols that’s among the top markets in the crypto industry, has adopted a proposal suspending the use of four digital assets as lending collateral.

The move follows a governance vote that passed Proposal-131 by 99.99%, with the development seeing the protocol pause the use of 0x (ZRX), Maker (MKR), Basic Attention Token (BAT) and Yearn Finance (YFI). These tokens are deemed to have very low liquidity, potential profiles that malicious actors can exploit.

Protecting against market manipulation attacks

According to Compound, the move to pause the use of these assets as hard collateral takes effect in two days, with the initial announcement made on Monday.

The result is that borrowers will not access loans with ZRX, MKR, BAT and YFI as collateral.

Explaining the motivation behind Proposal-131, the Compound team referred to it as “out of abundance of caution.”

“An oracle manipulation-based attack analogous to the one that cost Mango Markets $117m is much less likely to occur on Compound due to collateral assets having much deeper liquidity than MNGO and Compound requiring loans to be over-collateralized. However, out of an abundance of caution, we propose pausing supply for the above assets, given their relative liquidity profiles.”

Compound’s move is thus aimed at protecting its users from potential attacks staged via market manipulation of these low liquidity tokens.

Solana-based lending marketplace Mango Markets suffered a $117 million exploit that took advantage of the low liquidity profile of the protocol’s native token to manipulate prices.

The Compound protocol went live in September 2018, pioneering user-to-protocol collateralised borrowing, a innovation that helped to power the first wave of growth across decentralised finance (DeFi).

Data from tracking platform DeFiLlama shows Compound Finance is the ninth largest DeFi protocol, with $2.28 billion in total value locked (TVL).

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