Compound is making a renewed bet on the institutional market, deploying $52 million and adopting a new setup involving Coinbase Custody, Anchorage and Maple. The move comes after a steep contraction in the protocol's scale: its total value locked, or TVL (total value of crypto deposited), has fallen from a peak of $12 billion to about $1.2 billion, leaving its deposit base at less than one-tenth of Aave's. The source frames the shift as a high-stakes attempt by one of DeFi's original lending protocols to find a new path to growth after losing the retail momentum that helped define the DeFi Summer boom.