Aave Cowswap Integration- Tokenholder Questions

[misher]

@misher

Was the conflict of interest between CoWswap’s Stefan George and Aave’s Stanislav Kulechov disclosed? They are both Angel investors in Dune and KPL together, it would be reasonable to assume they are known to each other and may have a personal relationship. Even the perception of a conflict should be avoided.

The funding round also drew a range of angel investors from around the digital asset ecosystem, including protocol founders like Aave’s Stanislav Kulechov, Aragon’s Luis Cuende and Gnosis’s Stefan George, among others.

https://www.theblock.co/post/78563/dune-analytics-seed-round-ethereum

**Our key investors include:
**
Martin Köppelmann, Stefan George & Friederike Ernst, co-founders of Gnosis
Stani Kulechov, founder of AAVE

So Gnosis/CoWswap’s Stefan George and Aave’s Stani Kulechov are both investors at KPK. KPK was recently booted as Gnosis treasury management company in a very close vote because they were taking large fees for almost no work (Gnosis’s DAO agreed you don’t need a paid service to do nothing). During this discussion the Gnosis forum was brigaded by KPK employee accounts pretending to be DAO members and Stefan even spoke in support without disclosing his investment in KPK.

Source

The question comes up, does Stanislav Kulechov have any investment in CoWswap? What exactly is the relationship between Stefan George and Stanislav Kulechov? Was this a you scratch my back I scratch yours deal where Stefan got Stanislav an investment in KPK which had an easy money stream taking care of Gnosis’s treasury and Stanislav got Stefan’s CoWswap integration into the Aave website?

CoWswap also contains many employees/owners of KPK such as Marcelo Ruiz de Olano it’s co-founder. KPK also serves as the treasury manager for CoWswap. So we have a company Stanislav is invested in directly receiving money from CoWswap which receives money from Stanislav’s Aave. Did CoWswap award KPK the contract in return for Stanislav getting CoWswap the Aave contract?

This isn’t just suspicion, this is a direct conflict of interest between two companies Stanislav is invested in where Stanislav personally profits from the decision. This is why in any business you disclose the conflict and step back, Stanislav should not have been involved in the decision to use CoWswap. Stanislav is not Elon Musk he doesn’t own Aave 100% and does not get to use the DAO’s funds to enrich himself. This is corruption at the highest level, Stanislav made money personally by taking away from Aave DAO.

edit: to add, it’s come to light KPK does work for Aave’s treasury management and for Aave labs. Given that Gnosis booted them for overcharging for little service despite the co-founder of Gnosis owning part of KPK and fighting it, I’d suggest Aave should follow their example even if the founder of Aave who owns part of KPK fights it.

edit2: I wasn’t aware that KPK no longer manages Aave’s treasury or Gho but have been told that they no longer do.

Fully expect my post to be deleted or me to be banned from the forum after posting this.