I’m happy this discussion was split into branding/ownership and this original topic paraswap vs cowswap.
For the Paraswap debate specifically, I personally think Aave Labs is on the wrong side of history, and I want to summarize here why:
- The interface was payed for on the retroactive funding.
- The inteface was very actively marketed as “decentralized interface”, with huge emphasis on
app.aave.com, only pointing to some ipfs hash for most of the time. - if you look at the contributions over time, you will see that other SP contributors (tokenlogic, aci, bgd-labs) have contributed significantly to various features, on the common “decentralized interface”.
- Aside from direct contributions, tremendous effort has flown into supporting Avara on integrating new ecosystem contracts like governance v3, umbrella, new stk tokens, migrations(v2->v3, stkv1 → stkv2)
- In addition to these direct contributions, DAO SPs have spent a good amount of time improving paraswap, by optimizing routes and contributing to paraswap-dex-lib/src at master · VeloraDEX/paraswap-dex-lib · GitHub directly integrating GHO-GSMs and boosting Balancer boosted pool usage
Now claiming the ui was never belonged to the DAO is a move that is dishonest and disheartening.
I think any resolution of this dispute that does not result in the DAO receiving back 100% of the funds redirected to Aave Labs on these specific integrations is a loss for the DAO.
If Aave Labs should be able to monetize, and in which form, is a different discussion.
Personally, I think there should be a way.