Years of Collaboration: Since 2019 | Total All-Time Transactions: 60,294 | Unique User Addresses: 4,667| Current Compound Automation subscribers: 50| 

We have been partnering with Compound ever since the early days of DeFi itself. But to understand what a seven-year partnership means in DeFi, you have to do a bit of time travel. 

Let’s go back to mid-2019. The phrase DeFi Summer hadn't been uttered yet; yield farming wasn't a thing; gas prices were measured in single-digit gwei (compared to triple-digit gas prices of 2021). And if you wanted to manage positions across different protocols, your only option was to keep five different browser tabs open, stare at a calculator, and hope your manual txs went through before the market moved. 

In this early ecosystem, Compound and DeFi Saver (then known as CDP Saver) were built on a shared, fundamental idea: DeFi could be much more intuitive and safer to navigate.

What started as a simple integration to help users bridge the gap between Maker and Compound V2 ultimately tracked the entire evolutionary arc of DeFi itself.

"In 2019, Compound became our first integration outside of Maker, a milestone that transitioned DeFi Saver from a single-protocol tool into an all-encompassing DeFi management platform. Our long-standing collaboration with the Compound team has enabled us to continually innovate, offering advanced features like single-transaction leverage management and automated protection against liquidations." - Nikola Jankovic, our Chief Marketing Officer

Where It Started: Beyond Single-Protocol Management

As mentioned, we first started collaborating in mid-2019, when DeFi Saver was still known as CDP Saver. 

Back then, we mostly catered to MakerDAO users, offering tools for advanced position management and automated liquidation protection. 

However, as the DeFi space began to grow and new protocols such as Compound emerged, we soon realized it was time to expand the toolkit to support those new, emerging projects. The very first protocol we added outside of MakerDAO was Compound V2 in June 2019, which at the time prompted CDP Savers' rebrand to  DeFi Saver.

In practice, this meant extensive wallet support and custom-made recipes that allowed users to borrow DAI from Maker and supply it to Compound in a single tx, or withdraw funds from Compound and use them to repay Maker debt - all without manually moving assets between protocols. 

Looking back, these were the predecessors of what would later become an integral part of the DFS toolkit. Zaps (custom-made recipes executed within 1 tx) now span to cover much more complex use cases.

How It Deepened: The Leap to Advanced Automation

By mid-2020, DeFi Saver's support for Compound had evolved from a simple integration into an advanced position management toolkit. 

The launch of a completely redesigned Compound dashboard marked a shift toward giving users the same level of control and tooling that had previously been available primarily for MakerDAO positions. 

Users could now easily view key risk metrics such as borrow power, collateralization ratio, and liquidation thresholds within a single interface. But more importantly, Compound users could then use 1-tx tools like Boost & Repay to increase or reduce leverage atomically (with DFS handling borrowing, swapping, and collateral management behind the scenes). 

However, these tools at the time did require them to use a DSProxy smart wallet. To make adoption easier, we built a migration option for users holding Compound positions in standard EOAs. Using DyDx, users could repay their existing debt, move their cTokens into a smart wallet, and recreate the exact same position under the new setup, within a single transaction.

This laid the groundwork for bringing DeFi Saver’s signature Automation over to Compound in July 2020.

Compound V3 and DeFi Saver

When Compound v3 rolled out in 2022, it introduced a key new functionality that prompted our team to enhance its interoperability. 

 The Compound team introduced a new 'permit' function that allowed for the execution of advanced, multi-step actions on a position with the use of special 'operator' contracts.

Before V3, if a user wanted to use advanced features like Boost, Repay, or automated leverage, they had to migrate their position into a DSProxy. While it worked great, it was a bit of a hassle for users who just wanted to keep things simple and stick to their standard EOAs.

With V3, our team was able to completely rethink this setup. 

Now, the user could use DFS Boost, Repay, and Automation directly on their standard EOA-based Compound V3 positions. A smart wallet was still working hard in the background as an "operator" to execute the moves, but it no longer needs to actually hold the position.

All of this prompted DFS to introduce:

• Notifications (for position changes through channels such as Telegram and email).
• Recipe creator: to create and save custom DeFi strategies that bundle multiple actions up into single txs.
• Loan Shifter: to move positions from V2 to V3 (or for debt, collateral, and protocol shifts).

Fast forward to December 2022, and things came full circle. The DeFi Saver Extension launched right inside the native Compound interface using Compound's Extensions Framework. This ultimately brought those advanced management and automation tools directly to Compound users without them ever having to leave the app.

The current chapter

As you know, DeFi Saver today supports more than a dozen DeFi’s most prominent protocols and offers a suite of powerful tools to manage them all within a single dashboard.

And today, when you open Compound V3 inside DeFi Saver, you’ll be interacting with a simple layout with a real-time risk monitoring dashboard, a one-click leverage panel for instant Boosts and Repays, and a dedicated Automation hub for setting up your 24/7 liquidation protection. 

In practical terms, just some of the things DFS xCompound V3 users have access to are:

1. Automated Liquidation Protection: If a market downturn threatens your position, DFS Automation automatically steps in, sells a portion of your supplied collateral, and repays enough debt to safely put you back in the green.
2. Use Recipe Creator: Create and save custom DeFi strategies that combine multiple actions into one tx.
3. Automated Take-Profit & Stop-Loss Strategies: You can set precise asset price targets. Want to completely unwind your leveraged position if ETH hits a certain target, or cut your losses if the market drops too fast? DFS will execute the entire multi-step unwind automatically in a single block.

4. Loan Shifter to migrate legacy Compound V2 positions over to V3 (switching the entire position from one protocol to another).

And speaking of legacy users, there is one important thing to note: even though Compound V2 still holds $89.45M in TVL, all new supplies and borrows are now fully disabled to push users toward V3. This freeze had unfortunately left legacy users unable to actively manage risk in shifting markets, as they could only withdraw collateral or manually pay back debt.

To give users an alternative, in December of last year we rolled out Repay (with collateral), available for all Compound V2 positions.

Whether your legacy position sits on a standard EOA or a smart wallet, you can now use your existing collateral to instantly wipe out debt in a single transaction. 

Seven years later, DeFi Saver’s mission remains exactly the same: keeping your collateral safe, flexible, and completely under your control. 

By the numbers

Since the partnership in 2019, Compound x DeFi Saver users have completed 60,000+ transactions, including 6,421 automated executions. As we near Compound V4, we look forward to penning the next chapter of our shared history with one of our longest-standing partners.

That would be a wrap-up of this historical overview of the DeFi Saver x Compound long-standing partnership.

Until the next post, stay safe out there!

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