Marc, appreciate you putting the effort into this and we all value your passion for the Aave project and it’s impact in the wider DeFi ecosystem.
This is my first ever forum post because it’s a topic that is important to Keyring and myself as an Aave holder. Aave is clearly going through a difficult period, and surfacing concerns openly is the right way to resolve them and move forward.
I have some points to add on Arc and marketing, a pushback on WLFI, some additional corrective suggestions, and a few direct asks of ACI.
The two additional angles from the institutional adoption side that I’d add are,
- Aave Arc: Arc was a headwind in TradFi bd conversations. Due to Aave’s scale, it was the reference point for “institutional DeFi,” and in practice it never reached meaningful size. Ops issues with key partners throttled any meaningful adoption and made my own BD conversations tough. Less so in the last 12 months, but it was a drag having to explain that Arc wasn’t a definitive example of TradFi adoption of lending markets.
- Positioning The institutional marketing narrative has felt slow / muddled compared to peers. Morpho’s messaging and BD over the last couple years has been exceptional (cf. “DeFi Mullet”). Meanwhile, Aave felt constrained and old fashioned. This morning alone we’ve had two partners reach out to primarily build on Morpho as an example instead of via Horizon, when frankly they could have worked with Horizon.
Nevertheless, I would defend Labs on the WLFI point. I think it’s unfair to single labs out on this point when many significantly stronger resourced companies and even nation states have had similarly changing requirements and confusing negotiations with those involved on the other side of WLFI.
Additional Corrective Suggestions
- Labs-led Postmortems According to Marc (personal chat), it seems that labs haven’t really done any public postmortems. Part of the issue and friction is likely that the dao is relying on others starting the postmortem process. If Labs created proper postmortems on the forums it might ease the friction.
- Communication I think that labs might do well by bringing on more sales / bd people or even having a specific marketing/bd entity(entities?) separate from labs. A lot of the criticism from Marc is around communication. Labs do some things well but I am not sure I have seen their bd to be that strong. The curator model benefits greatly from having a large network of incentivised sales and bd satellites and I feel Aave has struggled to compete.
Asks to ACI:
- Can you summarize the minimum action items you want to see required before any further Labs funding or additional AAVE voting power is approved? (do you demand all of the e.g., unbundle the vote, disclose holdings / voting infrastructure, define KPIs + milestone-based disbursements, independent V4 review, foundation first, etc. or do you see some as longer term items)
- What do you think Labs have done well? Can you point to things in the last 2 years? By looking at what worked well it helps the discourse and enabled repetitive patterns around good PMFs.
- What is the core aim with Labs? Is your aim to change/improve Labs or change the primary operator of Aave?