My heart bleeds writing this reply. When i started building Aave in 2017, at a time where ACI wasnt even a thing and DeFi did not exist, i had a dream, to build a new financial infrastructure. I poured my blood, my sweat, my passion in Aave. I went through some truly dark times, building ETHLend Baiji while in the hospital to my father’s side, half dead in bed after a stroke. I remember we had to navigate some rough seas. When LEND went below 0.01, a lot of people was proclaiming us dead. We never stopped. Aave V1 came after long, almost interminable internal discussions on how ETHLend, then Aave, should have moved forward. I built ETHLend, Aave V1 and V2 side by side with Ernesto and Andrey, two professionals for which i have extremely high consideration. They did and still do an amazing job at BGD. I coded the Aave Governance V2 together with Ernesto in a weekend, just to make sure we would meet deadlines. When Ernesto and Andrey left, for their own reasons, i was left alone leading V3, for which i have designed the majority of the features, wrote large parts of the original codebase, and formalized the implementation including the whitepaper (aave-v3-core/techpaper at master · aave/aave-v3-core · GitHub). In all of this, I have never considered, not even remotely, that one day i would need to defend myself against such a character assassination attempt, by the same people that actively claim to defend what without me (and stani, ernesto, andrey) would probably never even existed in the first place.
I will try to keep my answer dry and free from feelings, although it’s not going to be easy: this affects me deeply, and while all this misinformation can be easily dispelled, the emotional and public damage will probably last for a while.
1. On my Github commits and contributions. I havent double checked ACI numbers, they sound about right although probably the real number is much higher given that there have been multiple migrations of the repos even between public/private orgs. As ACI correctly states, my contributions dropped significantly after the V3 release. The reason is pretty simple. After pushing hard from late 2017 all the way to the V3 release, i was completely burned out. Ernesto and Andrey had left 6-8 months before (i think that was the timeline but i may be wrong) and i was basically alone leading the engineering team all the way to the V3 release. I had to provide major codebase contributions, review my teammates PRs, supervise frontend development, participate in UX design and testing, supervise the deployment process and all the major protocol decisions. All of this, after years of grinding with V1 and V2, broke me down to the physical level. I still feel it as of today since i live with constant lower back pain. Therefore, after V3 i needed a break. I decided to take an hiatus of indefinite duration, even though i reduced my direct contributions, i still supervised the GHO release till summer, at that point i tried to disconnect almost completely. I said tried, because in reality i never did. With BGD coming to life and starting to take over the maintenance of V3, the 2023/2024 were challenging years for aave from a technical perspective - we had to face a few threatening security issues that presented some major challenges. Even though i never directly participated in fixing these issues, i was always there whenever there was something needed. I have been in warrooms due to these issues even during weekends, while i was supposed to be on a break. Again, BGD always did the vast majority of the work, but i was there when needed - discussing the potential vulnerabilities and possibilities for solutions.
After around a year of being away from pure development, while still following Aave and how Aave V3 was performing (and evolving) closely, i started to notice some chances for improvement, and some major possibilities started to surface. Then i decided to come back. I went to london, met Stani in the office, and thats when the V4 R&D started. It was mid 2023. Thats what led to the initial V4 proposal in the summer of 2024. I chose to build V4 with Stani and not with Ernesto and Andrey for one simple reason - Even though they had invited me to join BGD as cofounder and i had initially accepted, the plan was to do so after the release of V3, but at that time, i had already decided to take a break. When I then decided to come back, almost a year had passed. BGD was Ernesto’s and Andrey’s creation, not mine. I felt much better going back to Labs - a familiar place i had left just a few months before. I still remember the call with Zeller, that I considered a friend at that time, to communicate that i was coming back - his first answer was, “why are you going back to labs? You should create your own company, labs has to die”. I admit I grossly underestimated that statement - only recently i truly understood the meaning of it.
So yes - a year plus of little to no commits, because i took a (much needed and well deserved, in my opinion) break. After i joined Labs back, i started in another role - VP of engineering, at an higher level of abstraction and with more involvement in company dynamics, bizdev and product design. My direct code contributions is therefore drastically reduced - but i designed, and supervised the implementation of, every single V4 feature. That explains why my code contributions arent visible - i am not a pure programmer anymore, although i know the V4 codebase by heart and i can explain every single line of it, if anyone needs a demonstration.
**2. On my participation in the GHO Liquidity committee
**
Again, i havent double checked ACI numbers but they are probably correct. When the GLC was created, the goal was to boost the (then lacking) GHO peg and liquidity. This is one of the hardest jobs there is when talking decentralized stablecoins: as an asset that is natively being shorted (as in minted and sold on the market) keeping the peg is a confidence and bizdev game. I joined without little to no experience in it, and i have no problem admitting it. My job was not to create or propose strategies (which was brillantly done by @TokenLogic for the most part, for a little while by tokenbrice, and with very little involvment by ACI). We were in fact building the GHO GSM and other infrastructure pieces (some of these - like automated interest rates - have then been dismissed as tools like @ChaosLabs risk oracles are better suited for it in the long term). I wanted first to understand and monitor what strategies the DAO was planning to employ, and also see how we could translate eventually these strategies onchain or build tools around them that could help - the GSM and the GHO crosschain infra were part of this effort. That explains why i had zero proposed transactions - i was never supposed to in the first place, it wasnt my job to propose anything neither i had the competences to do so. As for the signatures, after the initial effort, the GLC (then renamed ALC) work became quite frantic: very often transactions were pushed late at night, or at times of little availability during holidays or weekends. Here a screenshot of a discussion with another GLC member asking to sign transactions at 11PM on sunday, after which i said i wouldnt have been available to sign any further as i couldnt guarantee 24/7 availability:
And here the screenshot where i communicate that unfortunately i wasnt able to provide 24/7 availability, and that wasnt even part of the initial plan:
Ultimately, i want to clarify that joining the GLC was completely volunteer work. I havent been compensated for it, neither was included in my salary, nor Labs was in any mandate for it. One can argue that others werent either - fair, but it also needs to be sustainable. Being available 24/7 wasnt for me.
3. On ACI maintaining the frontend
ACI has two employees that have contributed to the frontend - Nandy and Martin. Both of them account for a grand total of 80 PR. Pretty much all these releases are related to Merit incentives campaigns (Merit is a product that ACI built for incentive redistributions based on Merkl). Out of the 80, 66 (82.5%) were intended to:
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Change/improve tooltip texts
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Add/replace icons for Merit rewards
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Activate/deactivate incentive visuals on certain assets
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Merit-related trivial config updates.
Maybe this is hard to understand for the average reader, but if you are at least a little bit familiar with software development, you should at least recognise how these PRs represent an absolutely irrelevant part of frontend development. Its literally just changing some texts and adding some icons. What about:
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Hosting infrastructure
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Features development
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Network management (Aave frontend supports 15+ networks)
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Wallets integration
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Transaction management
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UI/UX
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Security/penetration tests/QA
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Governance driven updates (Aave gov V3, umbrella and the new stacking infrastructure were absolutely massive changes)
There are literally zero contributions by ACI in all of these key areas. The Aave frontend has been running for 6 years without a security incident, and driven 90% of the users and loan volume to the protocol, therefore accounting for the majority of the revenue generated. You can count on one hand other projects that achieved such results in DeFi. Trying to pass the message that the frontend “broke down” because ACI stopped updating icons and tooltips is misleading, to be gentle. I am not even gonna comment on the MegaETH bug - was literally fixed in less than 1h and only affecting one specific eMode category (not “made the instance unusable”).
On a side note, one of the reasons why little updates to keep merit integration functional are needed is because Merit is, technically speaking, a mediocre product, a nightmare to integrate and hard to configure. So hard that ACI itself frequently misconfigures it themselves. Just recently, a misconfiguration by ACI made it look like PYUSD suppliers would receive RLUSD incentives. Both Paypal and Ripple complained about it. Here are the screenshots to prove it:
These kinds of mistakes are much more damaging for partner relationships than a PT icon gone wrong.
4. On the Aave V3/V4 transition
The way this is still being used to try and manipulate public opinion is frankly disheartening. At Aave Labs, we have been saying multiple times that what we are looking for is a graceful migration. There is no attempt to damage V3 or the V3 users, and V3 can live for all the time needed, without any parameter change, for V4 to acquire the required lindynesse. This has been said over and over again. ACI has ignored all the internal calls for SPs that Labs has organized to make sure that all SPs are aligned for the V4 release, and start approaching V4 with the right mindset. These calls have produced amazing work by @tokenlogic, @chaoslabs and @llamarisk - where they explore the the potential and benefits of V4:
Unlocking yield with the V4 reinvestment controller - LLamarisk
https://governance.aave.com/t/unlocking-yield-aave-v4s-reinvestment-controller/24002
Aave V4 liquidation engine analysis - Tokenlogic
https://governance.aave.com/t/v4-spoke-liquidation-parameters-impact-on-revenue/23993
Hub and Spokes in Aave V4 - TokenLogic
https://governance.aave.com/t/hubs-spokes-in-aave-v4/24040
A design framework for pooled and isolated bluechip collaterals - Chaos
https://governance.aave.com/t/aave-v4-a-design-framework-for-pooled-and-isolated-bluechip-collateral-markets/23839
ACI has put zero effort into trying to understand V4. I am not surprised they dont understand the potential, but i am wondering how they can even make wise decisions on how to leverage it for the future of the DAO.
5. On my governance participation
Yes, it’s true that i have drastically reduced my governance participation. Reason, again, pretty simple - ACI has created a toxic environment that I would rather avoid. This toxic environment is on the forum, and even more in the open. It affects other SPs, it affects partners, it affects people who want to join Aave but would rather avoid it in order not to deal with this entity. I do not recognize this way of operating and as long as this entity is present, i will avoid any communication that is not strictly necessary for the DAO to function. Most of these communications don’t happen on the forum anyway but in channels where reaction times are more important. I will however, cast my NAY vote to their next renewal, if that comes to be. One thing is certain - i will always show up to defend my work, Labs contributions and employees and the Aave DAO whenever is needed, with proof and tangible evidence like in this post against the misinformation of the OP.