I’ll post a more detailed answer tomorrow touching proposal substance, but I want to cut through the attempted gaslighting now concerning funding and “Decentralization”.
Aave Labs created a problem and extracted roughly $5.5M of potential Aave DAO revenue.
Since then, we’ve seen roughly $1.5B wiped from $AAVE market cap and a real, lasting hit to reputation.
Now Labs is back with a $50M “solution”, presented as “for the good of the DAO”, after zero prior coordination with delegates or service providers.
Instead of engaging directly with the people who actually run governance day to day, the strategy has been to shape the narrative through KOLs and proxy accounts. That’s not how you build legitimacy. That’s how you manufacture it.
We’ve seen this playbook before: open with egregious terms, absorb backlash, then reframe a smaller ask as “the reasonable middle ground” while still extracting a massive amount.
And at this point, there’s not much left to debate: Labs has now shown, repeatedly, that when a decision touches its own interests, it will vote its $AAVE accordingly. That’s their right as holders. But it also means the “discussion” is largely theater when one party can reliably enforce its preferred outcome with voting power.
Let’s be honest about where we are: Labs is acting as if it can impose outcomes regardless of governance process. If token holders are comfortable with that, so be it, but I’m not going to pretend this is healthy governance.
At this point, the fox controls the henhouse, and the incentive is clearly to maximize extraction.
Good luck, friends.