[COMPOUND] Aera for Compound Service Provider Payments

Simple summary

We propose a standard payment process to be followed by all service vendors of the Compound DAO. This new process utilizes on-chain protocols, Aera Vault and LlamaPay, to setup long-term payment streams in USDC that reduces both price-risk for vendors and governance overhead for DAO voters. This has the added benefit of improving the financial position of the DAO treasury allocated to future service costs by supplying liquidity to cUSDCv3 that earns additional yield.

We propose using an Aera vault as a mechanism for vendors to receive payments in stablecoins while also providing liquidity for key Compound markets for unvested payment streams. Specifically we propose:

1. Creating an Aera vault owned by Compound Governance that deposits a lump sum of COMP based on current annual expense needs plus an additional buffer to hedge for price fluctuations
2. The Aera vault will diversify out of COMP and into USDC using onchain vehicles like UniV3, Bebop, and Milkman
3. USDC will be deposited into the Compound III ETH-USDC comet as cUSDCv3 to generate yield on the holdings while providing liquidity to the market
4. Payment streams will be set up per vendor that uses the Aera vault as a source and the Vendor’s multisig as a sink transferring USDC to meet Compound vendor payment obligations.
5. On a yearly cadence the Aera vault will be topped up with COMP via Compound governance.

This proposal will enable the first three steps by initializing an Aera vault and funding it with COMP. Payment streams to vendors will be initiated through future proposals.

This is a non custodial vault, where the Compound Governor Bravo Timelock is the owner of the vault (and thus governance votes can initiate withdraw/deposit requests at any time). Gauntlet will be the guardian for this vault.

Full forum post

Specification

This proposal will: 1. acceptOwnership of the Aera vault, hooks module, and asset registry 2. _grantComp to the Compound Timelock address 3. transfer COMP to the vault 4. resume the vault, allowing the guardian to operate

https://compound.finance/governance/proposals/249