Delegate Address: governance.karpatkey.eth (0x8787FC2De4De95c53e5E3a4e5459247D9773ea52)
Email: governance@karpatkey.com
Website: https://karpatkey.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/karpatkey
Introduction
Hello Aave Community! We’re excited to announce the karpatkey Delegate Platform and begin supporting Aave at our fullest capacity.
karpatkey is a DeFi-native organisation specialising in professional DAO finance through industry-leading research and tooling since 2020. We’ve been working with GnosisDAO, Balancer, ENS, CoW Protocol, and Lido on financial planning, operations, and strategy, diversifying their treasuries into sustainable portfolios of DeFi investments designed to support DAOs in executing their missions.
Motivation
It’s been more than three years since the implementation of a detailed financial/governance framework to formalise the path to the decentralisation and autonomy of the Aave Protocol, later being added voting and proposal power delegation through Governance v2.
We’ve been advocates of delegated voting in DAO governance as a viable solution to improve the legitimacy, inclusivity, and effectiveness of decision-making processes. However, the efficacy of this system is highly dependent on having domain experts actively involved as delegates. It fosters a symbiotic relationship between all stakeholders, optimising the quality of collective decisions and reinforcing the democratic underpinnings of DAOs.
Our past work has led us to develop internal infrastructure for automatic on-chain treasury execution and risk management, which ultimately generated objective knowledge across DeFi protocols and hands-on user experience.
We’ve contributed to the development of an Aave fork project and historically deployed, borrowed, and staked a combined $26.51M worth of LP positions in both Aave V2 and V3:
- Supplied 9,000ETH to Aave V2;
- Supplied 3,149stETH to Aave V2;
- Borrowed 35.8WBTC from Aave v2;
- Borrowed 900ETH from Aave V2;
- Supply wstETH / Borrow WBTC migration from Aave v2 to Aave v3;
- Staked 16,907AAVE in the Safety Module.
We now believe we can meaningfully contribute to solidifying Aave’s position as the leading DeFi lending protocol, not only through domain expertise but mostly through pushing positive-sum initiatives with the DAOs we work with.
Why us
karpatkey’s governance team taps our network of engineers, DeFi strategists, data/financial/quant analysts, and accountants for subject matter expertise. As DAO treasury developers and contributors to some of the most reputable DeFi protocols in our industry, we believe that our team has the knowledge, trust, and alignment to meaningfully contribute to Aave’s growth moving forward. Check out our values to understand a bit more about our guiding and decision-making principles.
We differentiate ourselves by being a hands-on delegate, actively leveraging our unique position in assembling a DeFi block of DAOs with similar values.
Here are some ideas for potential contributions to the Aave DAO:
- Explore opportunities for new business, integrations, promoting the overall growth of Aave markets and revenue;
- GHO adoption on Gnosis Pay and GHO Liquidity on Gnosis Chain;
- Increase Aave TVL from other DAO treasuries like Gnosis, ENS, Balancer, and Lido;
- Commit our existing resources from our Balancer Finance Core Unit to support Aave adoption and increased TVL including operations, gauges, and boosting pools on Balancer/Aura;
- Collaborate on pushing partnerships with the DAOs we contribute to, particularly Lido-Aave and Balancer-Aave, which have a lot of shared ground;
- Explore ideas on Lido v2:
- Gnosis module bonded collateral deposited in Aave GC until liquidated;
- A new staking module acting as a priority lane for Aave in case (w)stETH needs to be liquidated;
- GHO as a bonding asset for new permissionless nodes;
- Lido minting GHO with stETH in treasury reassurance of not being liquidated and providing liquidity.
Main Focus Areas
We’re seeking to focus our efforts on the three topics we can contribute the most, both with our experience and influence. There’s been extensive research on these subjects, and karpatkey wants to actively join the community discussions.
1. Aave DAO Treasury
There’s an opportunity cost and a large potential risk in having Aave DAO’s assets idle without active risk management. Deploying a portion of the DAO’s funds across a diversified risk-adjusted portfolio can earn additional yield while guaranteeing sufficient runway and optimised risk exposure.
2. GHO
GHO is a significant strategic move for Aave. It has the potential to increase the utility of the protocol, generate revenue for the DAO, expand the ecosystem, and support decentralised stablecoins’ diversity to provide alternatives, making the ecosystem both more resilient and attractive.
3. Aave Safety Module
Aave’s recent exposure to the CRV markets’ volatility in light of the Vyper zero-day exploit was a reminder of the importance of increasing asset diversity and capital efficiency of the funds deposited in the Safety Module. This initiative will reduce the insurance cost and AAVE’s dependence in case of a shortfall event, and increase the cover value as well as the yield for depositors.
Conflicts of Interest
We’re active delegates in GnosisDAO, Uniswap DAO, and Safe DAO (Boardroom), and hold multiple crypto assets in our treasury. Please check our treasury reports for more information.
We commit to abide by the Aave’s Delegate Code of Conduct.