check this
Appreciate you sharing your perspective — especially as an early participant.
I agree that the tension we’re seeing isn’t about intent or effort, but about structure.
The uncomfortable part is that without a clear residual claim for the token, long-term value capture becomes structurally constrained, no matter how successful the protocol is operationally.
That’s why I think this discussion matters beyond any single proposal or moment.
If the token does not ultimately participate in future value creation, then governance alone cannot explain long-term valuation.
That’s a design question, not a moral one.
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This was all debunked before. While the snapshot does not specifically mention frontend, the images and breakdown on the forum suggest so.
Overall, there were multiple functions involved in V3’s creation. These functions included Data Science, Risk Management, QnA, Dev Ops, Smart Contract Engineering, Front-end Engineering, Back-end Engineering, Product, and Design.
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After five years of holding the AAVE token, I am now full of doubts about what will happen next, which is unfortunate. I will leave the legal aspect aside.
I would like to propose something fairer with regard to the swap. This migration to cowSwap is completely unjustified. the following model is proposed:
-> Replace the swap provider with Velora (previously Paraswap)
+Slightly increase the base points with the following distribution of related revenues:
-
85% for DAO
-
10% for aave-labs
-
5% to buyback VLR tokens to support the DeFi ecosystem. (Velora tokens, if staked, could reward the Aave dao with Ether, which is paid monthly based on the protocol’s revenues
Focus on 2 and 3, make some comments
Now it is not the time to debate such trivial details; this is a core issue that bears on the very survival of the entire protocol in the future. Should the ownership of the brand and traffic entry points belong to the DAO?
I’m not sure what the DAO wants a brand or traffic end points for. Does TCP/IP have a brand or traffic end points? It does not and yet you’re using it right now. Both TCP/IP and the Aave protocol have been abstracted away from their users and both are wildly successful because of it. Both are public goods and neither should be contorted into anything else.
Aave is fantastic at capturing value as evidenced by the size of its treasury. The DAO controls the treasury and tokenholders control the DAO so tokenholders can make as much of the protocol’s earnings flow to the token as they want.
Since everything has been working so well, why not let ownership remain as it is and negotiate a settlement with Aave Labs for the DAO treasury based on the overhang from ICO funding?
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I’ve been following this discussion very closely, and I think it’s an important and legitimate one. The questions being raised around ownership, governance, alignment and long-term incentives clearly deserve thoughtful consideration.
That said, I believe there is a critical dimension that is being under-discussed in this thread: the agency problem and the confusion of roles between token holders, service providers, and the founding team.
Of course, many service providers are also token holders. That overlap is natural in DAOs. However, it does not eliminate the fact that service provision introduces additional incentives and constraints that are different from those of a purely passive or long-term token holder.
Many of the proposals and arguments presented here are reasonable when taken in isolation. However, it is hard to ignore that most of the strongest voices in this debate are also active service providers to the DAO, with direct economic and strategic incentives tied to how resources, responsibilities and control are allocated going forward.
This is not a criticism of service providers themselves, nor of the quality or importance of their work. On the contrary, Aave would not be where it is today without them. The point is simply that contribution and strategic mandate are not the same thing, and governance discussions should be explicit about that distinction.
Second, while it is true that multiple service providers have contributed meaningfully to Aave over time, they are not all equivalent in nature or impact. Aave Labs is not just another provider. It is the founding team, the origin of the protocol, the source of its strategic vision, and the group that has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to navigate complex market cycles while building one of the most successful DeFi protocols to date.
Placing the founding team on the same level as later-stage service providers, purely from a governance or ownership standpoint, fundamentally misunderstands how successful protocols are built and sustained.
Third, there seems to be an implicit assumption emerging that strategy could (or should) be defined collectively by a group of service providers who then coordinate execution among themselves. From a token holder perspective, this feels significantly less efficient and more fragile than the current model: a clear strategic leadership team supported by specialized, accountable providers.
The existing structure has worked exceptionally well so far. That does not mean it should never evolve, but it does mean that any change should meet a very high bar in terms of demonstrated necessity and expected benefit.
As a long-term token holder, I struggle to see why we would want to introduce major strategic uncertainty into one of DeFi’s most successful projects, especially when the proposed changes seem driven more by internal governance dynamics than by any clear failure of the current model. The market is already sensitive to this kind of uncertainty.
None of this means that questions around value capture, governance evolution, or token alignment should be dismissed. On the contrary, they are valid and necessary conversations. But they should be addressed in ways that strengthen alignment without undermining strategic clarity or proven leadership.
In my view, this discussion should be understood as important feedback for Aave Labs and the DAO to refine governance mechanisms — not as a mandate to redefine the strategic control of the protocol. Changing the strategic direction of one of DeFi’s most successful protocols, at this stage and in this manner, would be a mistake.
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I want to continue the discussion.
To escalate to vote over christmas is a clear hostile move and fits all the gaslight “nothing important here”, which many posters here and on twitter pretend.
So i would follow Marc advice and vote “neutral”
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I found this discussion only today when trying to figure out the reason for the price weakness of the token.
Very unfortunate situation for Aave, and it’s only getting worse…
It looks like a great deal of value is going to be destroyed for token holders in this process.
But, my tokens are in DeFi and the snapshot is already called, so I don’t even get to vote…
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Sadly yes. Token price action is the only value accrual for AAVE token holders since inception (except those who provided to Safety module ) and that is getting impacted badly now. The money spent on buyback can now be considered burnt as token price are back to those ole days. Hope things would get better in coming days
Whether the meaningful questions put forward by the likes of @MarcZeller and @EzR3aL have be answered with clarity or not already (many of us feel they haven’t yet), rushing a vote over the peak days of the Christmas period when many $aave holders are taking a break from crypto and work, is utterly bizarre. The final day to realistically vote is Christmas Day, ending in the early hours of Boxing Day. Does that or does that not sound utterly insane to you, when we could just delay the vote until the new year when everyone is back to work and back focused on crypto?
To get a truly fair result from the vote that reflects the views of all willing (to vote) aave holders combined, the vote should happen at some point in the 2nd half of January. That gives us all plenty of time to think and discuss after Christmas and New Year. Having most of the voting time be on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is crazy. It makes it look like the creator of that vote on snapshot wants to take advantage of the fact that many $aave holders are taking a break from crypto over Christmas and thus will not vote. It’s as sneaky a tactic as making that cowswap wallet address a private one WITHOUT first talking about it with the community, here in the forum.
For that matter, why refrain from mentioning and discussing that in the forum, first? Why not even mention it, even after implementing it? Why force us to dig and discover the private wallet address for ourselves? Logically, that would be because those doing it knew most aave holders probably wouldn’t agree to it, at least not without extensive discussion first. It was implemented sneakily, as is the timing of this snapshot vote. And this pattern of sneakiness should tell aave holders everything we need to know.
I’ll happily vote abstain on this. By January when everyone is back and focused on crypto again, a vote that took place bizarrely over Christmas is going to look meaningless, especially to those who missed the vote due to taking time off over the festive period.
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There are no benevolent actors here (except for you, dear reader). Each behaves in their own best interest which drives productivity and innovation which benefits everyone. It’s working great.
Aave doesn’t make money from token swaps or IP licensing. It makes money by facilitating lending and borrowing. The more lending and borrowing it facilitates, the more money it makes. Let’s facilitate more lending and borrowing.
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In my opinion, as it stands today, the issue under discussion is not “DAO vs Labs.” It is that several value-critical offchain control points, such as, domains, social accounts, trademarks, and UI distribution, sit outside the onchain governance boundary. This mismatch predictably generates ambiguity over control and economics, as recent interface-fee routing debates have illustrated.
The productive way forward is to decompose what is often loosely called “ownership” into three distinct and separable rights:
(1) Control rights — DNS, account recovery, admin access, and emergency response
(2) Economic rights — fee routing, licensing, and UI-level monetisation
(3) Stewardship obligations — security, enforcement, communications, and uptime SLAs
Much of the current disagreement stems from conflating these dimensions. In practice, they need not, and arguably should not be held by the same actor at all times.
A workable alignment model worth stress-testing is therefore the following: ultimate rights reside in a DAO-controlled legal wrapper, while Avara / Aave Labs operates under a contracted operator mandate. That mandate would specify explicit SLAs, scoped authorities, and time-boxed emergency powers, paired with onchain transparency and a credible recall mechanism. Where UI-only monetisation is appropriate, economics should be governed by a pre-agreed, disclosed revenue-sharing policy, rather than unilateral implementation.
This structure targets the real objective function: eliminating unilateral control over value-critical surfaces without impairing execution velocity or incident response. It also avoids the fiction that DAOs can practically perform trademark enforcement or real-time security operations by committee.
Framed this way, the question before the DAO is not whether to “centralise” or “decentralise,” but how to allocate rights and responsibilities so that incentives, accountability, and resilience remain aligned at Aave’s current scale.
And in my humble opinion, this discussion should be in a form of a TEMP-CHECK to iron out the details prior to a simple vote of “yes” / “no”.
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So many ideas in this thread for how to completely rearrange things. Have any of them ever worked in practice? Because the status quo has worked incredibly well.
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current scenarios as i see it
a. scenario 1 - proposal passes
dao gets full control of brand and ip. domains socials naming rights github npm everything
very low odds right now. polymarket has this at ~19%.
cleanest outcome on paper but could still trigger a real world lawsuit between the dao wrapper legal entity and aave labs
b. scenario 2 - proposal fails
aave labs keeps full control over brand, ip, all assets & everything.
this is where things get messy. community could launch a soft fork of the aave frontend that routes fees back to the treasury.
users split between the official labs front end and the dao front end.
3. scenario 3 - abstain wins
status quo continues. aave labs keeps the brand, ip and collects revenue from the cow swap integration for now.
4. scenario 4 - settlement
aave labs agrees to a revenue split or transfers fees to the dao to calm delegates. even then, dao likely continues pushing for brand and ip control.
either way, next few days are going to be very interesting.
I like your breakdown but please explain what is messy about a soft fork of the Aave frontend that routes fees back to the treasury, and users being split between the official Labs frontend and the alternate frontend. That is a beautiful thing. I believe we already have one alternate frontend from Defisaver. More frontends means the protocol doesn’t have to rely on any one frontend and users win when frontends compete against each other.
In my opinion , there is no good for the health of AAVE token scenario! Even the settlement scenario is harmful cause nobody knows when the next crisis will come
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It’d be productive to have concrete plans, including at the least legal and financial analysis, to better understand the different alternatives and unblock this situation. More ideas shared here are just too theroetical and aspirational. It’s hard to see how they’ll be an improvement to the current scenario or if they are feasible.
It’s not clear weather @eboado or @MarcZeller are in position to give more details about it or to share what would be the next phases. But @stani won’t share these insights since the status quo is in favor of his.
The current discussions don’t really bring any plans about the so-called benefits for token holders. At the end of the day, no agreements were reached and the token is just crashing. This whole situation was poorly managed but all parts, hurting mainly the Aave branding.
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Bought LEND in 2017, been holding it since. First time replying and probably voting. Looks like the discussion has been getting a bit nasty already and that is no good either you are just supporting or lending/borrowing on AAVE or holding token. At the end of the day most if not all token holders wish for the price of the token to rise.
Voting during holiday season feels a bit of a rush as well when there is still an open discussion on topic that brings alot of first timers to vote and discuss.
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