I worry that this proposal would strengthen transparency but, in practice, it would introduce confusion, subjectivity, and power asymmetries that are harmful for Aave governance.
For example, declaring onchain-valid votes as “socially invalid” creates a parallel governance system with no rules, no finality, and no clear authority. At Aave’s scale, governance outcomes must be deterministic and final. Otherwise every vote becomes contestable forever.
The definition of “material conflict of interest” is a bit vague and unenforceable. There are no thresholds, no neutral arbiter, and no clear process.
In a mature DAO, almost every important decision materially affects all service providers. In practice, this framework implies that, on the most critical decisions for the protocol, only small token holders with no direct involvement, limited context, and no touch with the Aave business would be able to vote.
There is also a serious asymmetry around delegation. The proposal explicitly excludes delegators from disclosure requirements, while focusing only on voting addresses. In practice, this pushes large holders or whales who wish to remain private toward delegation by default.
It’s my view that this goes directly against core principles of permissionless, self-sovereign participation. Principles that Aave, together with other leading actors of the ecosystem, should continue to uphold and represent.
This structure also runs the risk of disproportionately benefiting delegation aggregators, while the true origin of voting power remains opaque by design. Under the addendum’s own logic, this is a clear and material private benefit for some and not for others. Applying the same COI standard consistently would imply that such actors should not vote on this proposal.
More broadly, the framework proposed is not crypto-native.
Aave is a crypto DAO.
Legitimacy should come from transparent, onchain rules and finality, not from offchain moral judgments or social legitimacy policing.
Many service providers have historically received DAO compensation while acting as major voters, including on proposals where they were allocating funds to themselves. This was never an issue or seriously contested by the DAO. It was accepted, transparent, and is one of the reasons why Aave governance has worked and why we are here today.
Introducing complexity and ambiguity at this stage would only increase friction in Aave’s business and ecosystem relationships and ultimately favour competitors with simpler or no governance models.
For these reasons, I believe this addendum should not move forward.