Aave’s notorious “Aave Will Win” funding proposal simply cleared its first main governance hurdle right this moment, March 1, 2026, after acquiring a slim 52.58% approval, however ACI founder Marc Zeller wasted no time difficult the legitimacy of the vote, claiming that addresses linked to Aave Labs decided the result.
The off-chain snapshot vote closed on Sunday with 622,300 votes in favor, 497,100 votes towards, and 64,200 “abstains”. The end result strikes Aave Labs’ request for as much as $42.5 million in stablecoins and 75,000 AAVE tokens to the protocol’s Aave Request for Closing Remark (ARFC) stage, the place the phrases may be revised earlier than the everlasting on-chain vote.
Nonetheless, Zeller’s feedback alleged that roughly 233,000 tokens from three clusters linked to Aave Labs, together with a 111,000 token delegation from co-founder Stani Kulechov, which swayed the result.
From Zeller’s calculations, eradicating these votes would change the end result to 387,000 votes in favor and 497,100 votes towards.
Vote exposes deep governance drift
The slim margins from the revealed vote mirror months of accelerating tensions between Aave Chain Initiative and Aave Labs over protocol management, funding transparency, and the long run course of considered one of DeFi’s largest lending platforms.
Within the proposal, tokenholders had been requested to approve funding in change for Aave Labs redirecting all of its product income to the DAO treasury. This consists of charges from aave.com swaps, its upcoming cellular app, Aave Card, Aave Professional, Aave Package for enterprises, and Aave Horizon RWA market.
In change, Aave Labs requested funding to cowl operations it was beforehand protecting by way of product income.
In accordance with the proposal, “by directing 100% of income to the DAO, Aave Labs will be unable to self-fund going ahead. With out the flexibility to earn or elevate income, there is no such thing as a technique to cowl the prices throughout product growth, enterprise growth, and different operational features.”
Shortly after the vote, Kulechov himself posted on his X account saying, “Temp Examine for the Aave Will Win proposal has handed. This brings Aave Labs nearer to a completely token-centric mannequin, directing 100% of product income to the $AAVE token.”
Governance energy considerations growing
Zeller’s post-vote evaluation recognized some considerations about Aave Labs buying further governance weight by way of the 75,000 AAVE tokens. An Aave person additionally commented within the discussion board that “The danger of ACI consortium to exploit the AAVE DAO treasury is larger as they don’t have a lot AAVE tokens however management the day by day ops (operations).”
The vote got here simply after Zeller revealed an audit on February 25, the place he questioned the ROI for round $86 million that Aave Labs acquired in earlier funding rounds ($16.2 million from the 2017 ICO, $32.5 million from enterprise rounds, $31.93 million in direct DAO funds, and round $5.5 million from “unapproved” swap charges from aave.com).
The audit used ROI evaluation to evaluate Aave Labs’ historic funding. It credited Aave Labs with constructing V1, V2, and the preliminary V3.0 codebase, however argued that a lot of the following income progress got here from upgrades by the DAO service suppliers.
Zeller claimed that the V3.0 income amounted to $3.33 million, considerably lower than the $179 million generated after service supplier upgrades.
Aave Labs then revealed its personal report the identical day, reiterating profitable improvements just like the liquidity pool mannequin, Flash Loans, the Security Module, and V3’s Effectivity Mode, which had been all developed earlier than the DAO began utilizing a service-provider construction.
BGD Labs leaves the Aave scene
On February 20, BGD Labs introduced that it might not renew its engagement with the AaveDAO after April 1, successfully ending a four-year tenure because the challenge’s essential technical contributor. The agency was instrumental in constructing and sustaining Aave’s V3.
Of their departure announcement, BGD Labs talked about centralization considerations with Aave Labs and an uneven organizational state of affairs as their essential causes for leaving. BGD Labs additionally criticized what it described as an aggressive promotion of V4 by highlighting “unfounded” shortcomings of V3, regardless of its market dominance and safe observe document.
The framework additionally proposes making a Basis to carry Aave logos and mental property on behalf of the DAO, which addresses considerations about Aave Labs’ unique authorized possession of the model. Nonetheless, particulars on the construction, governance, and trademark switch would comply with in a separate proposal.