Understanding what a Compound governance proposal actually does can be tricky. While platforms like Tally do a great job of displaying proposal summaries, they often don’t show every detail, especially low-level data such as encoded transactions, rollups, and bridges. This requires a deeper understanding of the proposal flow and differs between protocols.
To help the Compound community dig deeper and verify proposals independently, ChainSecurity has developed the Compound Proposal Decoder, an open-source CLI tool that fetches and better displays everything that’s happening inside a Compound proposal.
Here’s the example of proposal 484. Tally would show for a proposal targeting a rollup (Arbitrum) as follows:
There is a big blob of data that is not understandable. Here’s how our decoder shows this data blob:
How it works
The tool:
- Fetches proposal data directly from the Compound Governor contract.
- Retrieves contract ABIs and names from Etherscan automatically.
- Decodes proposal actions into clear function calls with parameters.
- Handles bridge and rollup calls that are not decoded elsewhere.
- Outputs colorized, readable logs in your terminal.
It can be run easily via Docker or locally with Node.js, and it caches ABIs and contract names for faster future runs.
How to Use It
Run it in Docker, no setup needed beyond your Etherscan API key and RPC URLs:
docker build -t proposal-decoder .
docker run --env-file .env -v "$(pwd)/.cache:/usr/src/app/.cache" -it proposal-decoder <proposalIdNumber>
Or, for developers, clone and run it locally with:
pnpm run decode <proposalIdNumber>
You can also decode from saved JSON or raw calldata.
Helping the Community Understand Proposals Better
Transparency is key to secure and decentralized governance. By making proposal internals fully visible, the Compound Proposal Decoder empowers the community to independently inspect and validate what each vote entails, including the details that aren’t visible on Tally.
We hope this tool helps researchers, delegates, and community members alike build a deeper understanding of Compound’s governance process.
More details on Github
https://github.com/ChainSecurity/compound-proposal-decoder/