Summary

This proposal ends the Proposal Guardian's power to cancel governance proposals, effective 1 November 2026

The Community Multisig keeps its Pause Guardian role, so it can still pause markets if a critical situation arises.

The reason is simple: a majority of the multisig used the cancellation power to stop a valid proposal before voting started, taking the decision away from COMP holders.

Background

The Compound Governor gives one address, the Proposal Guardian, the right to cancel any proposal at any stage until an expiry date. That address is the Community Multisig, 0xbbf3…012c, which acts on a 5-of-9 signer threshold.

The power was granted as an emergency safeguard: to stop malicious or plainly harmful proposals, such as governance attacks or treasury drains. It was never meant to let a few signers decide which ordinary proposals COMP holders may vote on.

How the power was extended. The guardian's right to cancel was due to expire on 12 September 2026. In February 2026 the Compound Foundation proposed and passed Proposal 538, "Extend Proposal Guardian Role for the Community Multisig". It pushed the expiry out by an extensive period of 4 years. The Foundation described the role as "a critical fail-safe mechanism, allowing the multisig to cancel proposals that are identified as malicious or technically unsound." Proposal 618 was neither.

The incident. On 22 October 2026, the Community Multisig cancelled Proposal 618 while it was still pending, before COMP holders could vote on it. Proposal 618 would have moved the EPCF, a $5M DAO fund set aside to respond to threats to the protocol, to the Community Multisig. The cancellation is documented in Wrongful Cancellation of 618 by CommunityMultisig. The five signers who approved it were:

1. Cylon – 0x46B360011A84C5759680852ed90E6Db44E18F08c
2. Gauntlet – 0xFC63ef192E26E428f349057544a8786453C94f84
3. Arr00 – 0x2B384212EDc04Ae8bB41738D05BA20E33277bf33
4. PGov – 0x9A73D57BB1fB280C5672A13f655675De25F13b70
5. Zeroshadow – 0x55bea483873291eB3ded185c9962676F107cB4D6

The proposal met every on-chain requirement: it was submitted by an account above the proposal threshold and passed the Governor's checks. It contained no malicious code and posed no security threat to the protocol or treasury. COMP holders were never given the chance to vote on it.

Rationale

A majority of the multisig has broken the terms on which the DAO entrusted it with this power, so the power should end.

1. Breach of mandate. The guardian's cancellation right exists to stop attacks, not to filter legitimate proposals. Five of nine signers used it to cancel a valid proposal before a single vote was cast. That replaces the judgment of COMP holders with the judgment of five people.

2. Failure to protect the DAO's interest. The guardian is meant to stand between the DAO and those who would harm it. Here it was used against a proposal brought by a member of the DAO, through the DAO's own process. A safeguard that can be turned against tokenholders no longer protects them.

3. Conflicts of interest. The Compound Foundation has directly paid two of the signers, Arr00 and Cylon (advisor fees). Signers who are paid by one party cannot be relied on to act neutrally when that party's interests are in question. A majority of the signers has shown itself favourable to the Foundation's position rather than to the DAO's.

4. Power without accountability. The cancellation is final, immediate and cannot be appealed. The DAO has no way to overrule it except by removing the power. Ending it returns every decision on legitimate proposals to COMP holders, where it belongs.

5. The Foundation secured this power and benefits from its use. The Foundation itself proposed the four-year extension in Proposal 538, which keeps the cancellation power with a multisig whose majority it pays or aligns with until 2030. The Foundation's record on DAO funds also raises concern. The forum thread Misappropriation of the v2 DAI reserves by the Compound Foundation documents how 8.42M DAI of v2 reserves, placed under Foundation stewardship by Proposal 536 "exclusively to support protocol operations", was swapped into 344,780 COMP. That COMP was then delegated to the Foundation's own voting address before the votes on Proposals 580 and 582 (tx). A Foundation that acts outside its mandate should not depend on a guardian it can steer to block proposals that challenge it.

Specification

It makes one on-chain call: setProposalGuardian on the Compound Governor, keeping the Community Multisig ( 0xbbf3f1421d886e9b2c5d716b5192ac998af2012c ) as the recorded account but setting its cancellation right to expire on 1 November 2026 00:00 UTC (Unix timestamp 1793491200)