I want to name the pattern in this response, because it isn’t new. This is how Labs has handled governance feedback for years.
The Pattern
The community asks for something reasonable. Labs says “we’re open to it.” The vote proceeds. The thing never happens. Five proposals, same playbook:
2022, V3 Retroactive Funding. The community asked for AAVE token lock-ups. Labs agreed: “50% of the AAVE tokens after a one-year lock up, the remaining 50% after two years.” BGD’s on-chain analysis found no programmatic lock was ever enforced. The proposal “simply transfers AAVE to the Aave genesis team account.” The tokens went to a Gnosis Safe with no lock. The community asked for accountability. Labs agreed. The vote passed. The lock-up never existed.
2023, Snapshot Space Transfer. TokenLogic proposed migrating Snapshot control to a DAO smart contract. Labs responded: “We support handing over the responsibility of the Snapshot Space to the Aave DAO.” Three years later, Labs controls both aave.eth and aavedao.eth. When aavedao.eth expired in December 2025, Labs re-acquired it rather than letting the DAO take ownership. The entity asking for $51M still controls the infrastructure where the vote on that $51M happens.
2024, V4 Service Provider. Labs promised: “V4 will be developed within the one-year timeframe specified. No other payments are being proposed to the Aave DAO for the scope.” That was June 2024. Twenty months later, V4 is still on testnet. Labs has since requested an additional $1.5M for V4 security and is now asking for $51M more. “No other payments” lasted until the next ask.
2025, Horizon. Labs proposed a new token with only 15% allocated to the Aave DAO. Community revolted across 108 posts. Stani wrote: “there is no interest from our team to push anything that the DAO does not feel right.” They dropped the token and agreed to a 50/50 revenue share. The revised Temp Check and ARFC passed. Then at the AIP stage, BGD raised serious governance concerns. Labs dismissed them as “surprising” and said they would “move forward as planned.” ACI voted no. Ignas voted no. Labs published the AIP on a summer weekend and launched anyway.
On-chain records tell the rest of the story. A wallet now identified as under Stani Kulechov control cast 333K FOR votes on the Horizon AIP. That’s 57% of all support. Without it, the vote fails: 250K FOR vs 378K AGAINST. The founder of the entity proposing the deal used his own voting power to push it through over community opposition.
2025, CowSwap. When the community discovered Labs had been diverting ~$5.5M in swap revenue without a vote, Stani acknowledged: “It should have been brought up for discussion and should have done in a transparent way. This is very fair feedback and something we should improve in the future.” This one isn’t a broken promise. It’s an open admission that changed nothing. The diversion continued. It accelerated. From ~8 ETH/week to 204 ETH/week ($510K/week). “We should improve in the future” meant nothing changed in the present.
Five proposals. Five accommodations. Zero follow-through. Acknowledge the concern, agree in principle, pass the vote, move on.
The Size of This Ask
That’s the track record behind a $51M funding request. Let me put that number in context.
The entire non-Labs service provider ecosystem costs the DAO ~$16.5M/yr. BGD ($4.4M), Chaos Labs ($3M), ACI ($3M), Certora ($2.6M), TokenLogic ($2.5M), LlamaRisk ($1M). At the proposed $17M/yr, Labs alone would cost more than every other service provider combined.
ACI has received $4.6M over three years. That bought $142.9M in attributed annualized revenue. 3.4 cents per dollar of revenue growth. Full transparency report published, on-chain verified. Labs has received $31.93M lifetime. Monthly activity updates, but no accountability report. No attributed revenue metric. No cost-per-outcome breakdown of any kind. The DAO has no way to evaluate what the last $31.93M produced, and Labs is asking for $51M more.
A budget this size deserves transparency this strict. The DAO has never been asked for this much by a single entity. The entity asking has never been asked to account for what it already received.
This Proposal
Now here’s post #66. The community has asked for specific things before this vote proceeds:
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Unbundle the vote
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Disclose existing wallet holdings and voting power
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Publish a delivery report
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Reduce the budget
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Establish the foundation before funding
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Define revenue caps before voting
Labs’ answer to every single one: later.
Revenue caps? “We suggest setting these caps on a product-by-product basis in future proposals.” Foundation? “Unlikely to be live during the timeline between now and the final vote.” Independent verification? “We are investigating.” KPIs? “We are open to hearing additional KPIs.” Wallet disclosure? Not addressed.
And then: “we intend to keep the proposal moving through this phase.”
Same playbook. The community asks for preconditions. Labs offers post-conditions. Once the Temp Check passes, the direction is locked and the leverage is gone. Every “future proposal” and “ARFC stage adjustment” happens after the DAO has already said yes.
A few specifics:
“The foundation is unlikely to be live during the timeline between now and the final vote.”
Then delay the vote. The foundation is the oversight mechanism for $51M in funding. Approving the funding before the oversight exists is backwards.
“We will provide detailed quarterly reports.”
Labs publishes monthly development updates. Those are activity logs: what the team worked on. They’ve never published an accountability report: what the money bought, what it cost, and what the return was. Every other SP does this already. “We will” isn’t a track record. Given the five examples above, “we will” is a pattern of promises that don’t materialize after the vote passes.
“Our internal analysis indicates the DAO can support this funding request.”
Affordability isn’t justification. The question isn’t whether the treasury can handle it**. The question is whether this team, with this track record, has earned this budget.**
ACI’s Position
I’ve laid out the concerns clearly. Other delegates and tokenholders have too. If this proposal moves to Snapshot with these issues unresolved, with the vote still bundled, with no delivery report, with no wallet disclosure, with no COI framework in place, ACI will vote NAY.
That’s not where I want to end up. I’d rather see a clean proposal that the community can support. But the DAO can’t keep approving blank checks based on promises that have a documented history of not being kept.
Before this moves to a vote:
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Unbundle. Revenue alignment, V4 ratification, foundation, and funding are four separate decisions. Let each stand on its own merits.
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Deliver a transparency report. What did the previous $31.93M produce? Every other SP can answer this. Labs should too.
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Disclose holdings and voting power. The DAO traced 663K NAY votes to founding infrastructure during the COI vote. That question remains unanswered. Full wallet disclosure should be a precondition for any funding proposal.
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Adopt the COI framework. The Mandatory Disclosures proposal failed by 85K votes, with 96.3% of NAY traced to a single cluster. The entity requesting funding should not be the entity blocking the transparency framework that would govern how that funding is evaluated.
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Define caps in the proposal text. Revenue deductions, incentive spend, and discretionary costs should be capped and governance-approved, not deferred to “future proposals.”
These aren’t negotiating positions. They’re governance minimums. Every other service provider already meets them. Labs should meet them before asking the DAO to trust them with $51M more.