It’s wild how a bunch of people here are arguing about stuff that has nothing to do with the actual vote, and using “reasons” that are either out of scope or just describing the current status quo.
Here is what will happen next:
- The service-provider aligned DAO folks + delegates either abstain or just don’t vote on the rushed Christmas proposal
- Labs votes NO on sharing anything with the DAO (no IP means also no “profit sharing” promise, anything would be only “good will” as it was with Paraswap)
- Proposal fails, then Labs goes “see? we asked the people, nobody wants to change anything” and now they’ve got a nice “will of the people” receipt to keep status quo
- Labs already doesn’t want to share profits with DAO/tokenholders and they’ve tried multiple times to route flows to themselves instead of the DAO. That’s not shocking, once there’s real money, everyone wants their cut
- Regulations are clearer now, and the DAO-as-cover story isn’t as useful. Labs also got a MiCAR banking license, so they can operate more and more legally and more independently from the “shady DAO”. That’s the real trajectory, becoming independent from the money-sucking DAO
- Labs will ship new stuff under the Aave name, using Aave branding (cause they own the trademarks duh), and push it through official Aave channels. They can literally deploy V4, put it on the aave.com site, and direct all fees from protocol + UI to Labs, and the DAO can’t really do anything about it. That’s the endgame. They def won’t share any profits from Aave App (Horizon vibes, and Aave App was funded in-house afaik, correct me if that’s wrong). DAO will get breadcrumbs left from V3, and maybe V4 if they behave.
- In this setup Labs is super efficient (and yeah the Labs-defenders are right on that part!). The most efficient money machine is removing the DAO from the loop. That’s why the sudden Avara → Aave push this year, the aggressive marketing, and the army of employee defenders on socials
- So picture a future where everything Labs launches generates 100% fees to the Labs and 0% fees for the DAO. Cause why not? What’s the DAO gonna do, sue? There’s no real legal entity for it. It’s just a crowd holding tokens, and big companies will never care about that kind of folks, banks would never care, trust and institutions neither.
- Eventually either the DAO finds a new way to monetize and support token value, or the $AAVE bleeds to zero
People need to get this straight: the DAO needs Labs, not the other way around. Labs doesn’t need the DAO anymore, so they’re trying to drop the obligation that only drags them down.
This proposal was basically the DAO saying “if it’s called Aave, the DAO should get some piece of the profits, right? …right?” and Labs answered pretty clearly: “NO”.
So yeah. If you hold $AAVE and you want the DAO to get anything from the Aave brand going forward, you vote YES. Not that it would help… If you don’t care about the DAO or the $AAVE token, you vote NO.
As simple as that.
Aave Will Win.