Robert Leshner is the founder of decentralized finance lending platform Compound. Leshner also co-founded Safe Shepard in 2011, a service focused on removing personal information from companies that scan and sell personal information both on the internet and in private databases.
Robert Leshner Life
Robert Leshner is credited with founding the decentralized finance lending platform Compound in 2017. He has a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and is also the former chairman of the San Francisco Income Bill Oversight Committee.
Early in her career, Leshner founded Safe Shepherd, a privacy-focused startup that provides customers with information about how their personal data is used and what they can do about it. Prior to founding Compound, he worked at food delivery app Postmates and was head of commerce.
A native of Pipersville, Pennsylvania, Leshner is the son of Ivy Silver, founder of Commonwealth Consulting Group, and Steven Leshner, owner and chairman of Commonwealth Investment Management Group in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.
Robert Leshner attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a Bachelor of Economics. He is also a certified Chartered Financial Analyst. He is married to Allison Stern, founder and chief strategy officer of Tubular Labs (analytical company).
On October 1, 2011, Leshner co-founded Safe Shepard with Geoff Hayes, a service focused on removing personal information from companies that scan and sell personal information both on the Internet and private databases. The company has raised $629k over two funding rounds, and its last round was in 2013.
In August 2017, Leshner and Hayes released Compound, an open-source interest rate protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain. Since the two funding rounds, the firm has raised over $33.2 million, primarily from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The company’s official token, COMP, reached an all-time high of $231 per token in late June, making it a pillar of the growing DeFi (Decentralized Finance) network.
Leshner was a key player in the DeFi megatrend that swept the crypto space in 2020. Although Synthetix pioneered the concept of liquidity mining rewards, Leshner retains the management rights to Compound by users of the protocol. Alan quickly embraced the idea, which started an unprecedented wave of DeFi adoption and popularity.
Leshner’s Compound inspired the concept of DeFi lending protocols as seen today. Some, like Cream Finance, which launched in 2020, were direct forks of Compound’s codebase. Cream founder Leo Cheng explained that his team wanted to offer Leshner and the Compound team some CREAM tokens as a token of gratitude for improving the technology they use. Leshner refused to receive them for free and instead offered to act as the protocol’s security advisor.
According to Cheng, Leshner gladly helps opponents if it means advancing the field as a whole. However, he is also a vocal advocate of comprehensive security practices, and has sometimes criticized projects for copying code without understanding what it does.
Towards the end of the year, Leshner announced Compound Chain, a highly centralized blockchain for cross-chain value transfer. Although the plan was met with criticism, he stressed that it is an important step towards the emergence of a single global liquidity network.
Leshner is an active investor in innovative ideas, named after Braintrust, a traditional startup that embraces DeFi governance elements.
The COMP token distribution allowed Leshner to take a more unobtrusive approach to the Compound project. As the community is now encouraged to chart the course of the protocol, Leshner is beginning to diversify his involvement in DeFi through his investments and parallel projects.
With more developments coming from this front in 2021, the Compound Chain initiative is likely to take priority in the short term. Beyond that, Leshner is actively expanding his investment portfolio by providing guidance and support to DeFi and other projects in the crypto space.
