@EzR3aL, to answer your questions directly.
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No. “If the AIP is approved by the DAO, the Aave team will receive $16,280,000 million in retroactive funding for the development of Aave Protocol V3.” As this sentence, taken from the Compensation Model section of the retro funding proposal, clearly states, the V3 retroactive funding scope did not cover the front-end development costs. Protocol and frontend are two separate codebases, in two separate repositories, with two separate licensing schemes. The front-end engineering in the slide that was referenced, from the Retroactive Funding proposal, was showcasing the structure of the Aave Pod (i.e. the Aave Labs team), as the label “Aave Pod” indicates. In the corresponding snapshot, it states that retroactive funding was applied to the development costs incurred for developing and deploying the Aave V3 protocol itself, including risk features, eMode, and audits. The proposal and snapshot do not mention front-end development costs anywhere.
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No, we do not consider it to be viable or scalable to have product-layer decisions and funding to be governed by decentralized decision making. The CoW Swap adapters will continue operating as they are now. We do acknowledge that the DAO received meaningful surplus from the prior ParaSwap (now Velora) route due to Velora’s referral and surplus mechanics. The first order of business is to find a way to restore a similar surplus contribution under the CoW Swap direction. Additionally, in the upcoming weeks, we will share a framework that will clarify how Aave Labs will build and keep scaling its products vertically while always maintaining the interest of the DAO and token holders.
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We do not believe that the DAO governing Aave-branded domains is a sustainable long-term approach for users, builders, and the protocol. The protocol is permissionless, and while developer documentation exists, builders do not need governance approval to integrate or build on top of Aave. Aave-branded domains are a user-facing surface with a much higher bar for responsiveness, quality assurance, and user support, which is why they will remain operated by Aave Labs.
This model has given Aave Labs the freedom to quickly build products that have driven the bulk of Aave Protocol usage for the past 8 years, and the protocol revenue from that usage is what has contributed to the funding of the DAO’s service providers and sustained ongoing protocol operations. Thanks to these contributions and the work of many others within the DAO, the Aave protocol has become the largest DeFi protocol ever.
There has been legitimate feedback in this discussion. We’re committed to building the best in-class DeFi user experience, and we’re equally committed to making sure the DAO has a clear, explicit framework to understand how Aave Labs’ product decisions relate to protocol revenue streams.