Compound Setup and Interacting with Compound

This project was created in the context of the seminar on 'Blockchain Programming' HS21 at the University of Zurich, offered by the UZH Blockchain Center. Within this seminar, our group investigated the deployment of Compound - a financial protocol for autonomous interest rates - and it's application on mortgages. This repository only represents the technical setup.

The repository is composed of two parts. The first component compound-protocol includes the required files and scripts to fork the Mainnet and deploy intermediary layers abstracting the compound protocol. The second component, the compound-dashboard, is a simple front-end, i.e., a dashboard that serves as a web interface to the compound protocol.

Setting Up Compound

The first component of this repository serves as an easy way to run a local Ethereum blockchain. To do so, the Mainnet is forked and seeded with assets. Thereby, one can interactively test how the Compound protocol works. This process was adapted from the Compound developer guide. For more details, look into their tutorials. Note that the scripts used in this section are adopted from the Compound contributors (source).

First, clone this repository and make sure you have node and hardhat installed. Then navigate to the compound-protocol component and install the required dependencies.

cd compound-protocol
npm install

Next, Infura is used for Ethereum network access. Create an account and extract the Project ID. After that, execute the following commands to run the Mainnet fork on localhost.

export PROJECT_ID="<YOUR-PROJECT-ID>" 
export MAINNET_PROVIDER_URL="https://mainnet.infura.io/v3/$PROJECT_ID" 
export DEV_ETH_MNEMONIC="clutch captain shoe salt awake harvest setup primary inmate ugly among become"

node ./scripts/run-localhost-fork.js

For reasons of simplicity and safety, there are abstraction contracts available for deployment. This makes of the core features of compound easier:

cd compound-protocol

export PROJECT_ID="<YOUR-PROJECT-ID>" 
export MAINNET_PROVIDER_URL="https://mainnet.infura.io/v3/$PROJECT_ID" 
export DEV_ETH_MNEMONIC="clutch captain shoe salt awake harvest setup primary inmate ugly among become"

npx hardhat compile 
npx hardhat run ./scripts/deploy.js --network localhost

The output should look similar to the following:

Deploying contracts with the account: 0xa0df350d2637096571F7A701CBc1C5fdE30dF76A
Account balance: 10000000000000000000000
Contract CompoundBorrow address: 0xEcA3eDfD09435C2C7D2583124ca9a44f82aF1e8b
Contract CompoundSupply address: 0xE8a6f04DEF6d9fa9F02982b8E1d8Eea835fB7668

To test your local instance of the Compound protocol, one can run the dashboard-scripts to investigate the core features of Compound. To do so, run the following commands in a new terminal after starting your node as described above:

node dashboard-scripts/borrow-eth-via-solidity.js

The Compound Dashboard

To offer an accessible development interface, we have created a simple React dashboard that allows testing Compound's core functionalities of supplying, redeeming, borrowing and repaying assets. The source code of the dashboard is available within the second component compound-dashboard of this repository. Note that the dashboard does not make use of the intermediary abstraction contracts, optionally deployed in this section.

To run the dashboard, first make sure to have node with npm installed. The react-app makes use of Metamask to connect to the Ethereum network, therefore it is required to be installed as a browser extension, see here. The follow the steps below, then visit

cd compound-dashboard
npm install
npm start

In case you added or modified any contracts in compound-protocol/contracts/, deployed them and want to tether your dashboard to it, you may want to adjust the abi definitions at /compound-dashboard/src/scripts/contracts/contracts.json and the contract addresses at /compound-dashboard/src/const/addresses.js.