I need to remind everyone that this is only a temperature check proposal.
If you don’t currently hold enough AAVE, you still have the opportunity to accumulate sufficient AAVE before the upcoming ARFC and AIP snapshot votes.
Saying is always easier than doing. Let’s vote
Nobody is taking seriously AI slop pumped out by 4-month-old accounts that only show up to hype AAVE Labs 
Framing this as “the vote result is the DAO’s final decision” as if it were some pure expression of community will, is disingenuous when 4 wallets tied to AAVE Labs account for roughly 90% of the YAE votes. Calling that “organic consensus” is ridiculous, but also pretty sad
Saying “we want to gauge community sentiment” and then overwhelming a temp check with your own tokens defeats the entire purpose of a sentiment check. If you’re going to exercise decisive control, at least be honest about it
And no, this isn’t about “privacy.” Blockchains are pseudonymous, not anonymous. We already know those tokens are controlled by AAVE Labs–linked entities. The issue isn’t that they voted, it’s pretending they didn’t materially determine the result
Equating team-allocated tokens with tokens people bought with their own capital is also a weak argument. And telling critics “if you don’t like it, just buy $250M worth of tokens” also doesn’t make any sense at all
Update: The Mask is Completely Torn Off
The despicable Aave Labs and Stani—the founder of six failed projects—continue to use the more than 600,000 tokens they control to vote in favor of the $51 million grant.
@Millesimillia @AlanWestbrook These two accounts are clearly controlled by Aave Labs, because manipulating votes is such a shameless act that they are using them as a convenient cover-up.
Here’s a joke:
Aave Labs released a proposal stating that 100% of the revenue would go to the DAO. However, because Aave Labs holds the absolute majority of AAVE tokens for voting, all of the DAO’s revenue effectively went to Aave Labs.
To Aave Labs and Stani:
Thank you for not withdrawing all the funds from the DAO at once. If you had voted to destroy all AAVE tokens not in your hands, I believe the proposal would have passed too. I suggest issuing a new proposal: the 90 employees of Aave Labs and their descendants, and Stani’s future mansion, could all be supported by funds from the Aave DAO in perpetuity.
With the evidence irrefutable, we await the legal consequences for Aave Labs and Stani.
What you are executing today has exact, unforgiving definitions in traditional finance: Corporate Tunneling, Self-Dealing, and a Severe Breach of Fiduciary Duty. The SEC and the DOJ have already established exceptionally clear precedents for founders who use centralized control to misappropriate funds under the guise of “decentralized governance.”
If this vote is forced to pass, AAVE Labs and Stani will be permanently branded as a disgrace in the blockchain and DeFi world.
Please remember: SBF is still behind bars. The blockchain remembers absolutely everything—unless, of course, your hands are completely clean.
That is incorrect and I think it is not helpful to make wild allegations or demand that people may not use their tokens to vote (independent of who it is).
I am a private, independent Swiss investor with roughly 20 years of experience. I was never in contact with Aave Labs so far but I am now engaging a bit more actively as we seem to have a bit of a difficult situation.
Dear Stani Kulechov, Even though it appears you will easily win this battle, I respectfully appeal to you to withdraw the demands of the “AAVE WILL WIN” proposal and instead seek a new, genuine compromise solution.
Such a solution would allow the AAVE DAO to avoid a final and damaging rupture while delivering the greater accrual clarity that all token holders desperately need.To the AAVE DAO community as a whole, I must also assign responsibility for the unwise and public manner in which this dispute has been handled. This approach has caused real and unnecessary damage to token holders.
In every company across the world, disagreements over duties, responsibilities and claims arise from time to time. Yet these issues are never resolved in public view. Stakeholders convene privately, discuss calmly, and place the long-term good of the enterprise above any personal ambition or ego. The AAVE DAO should have followed the same professional standard.
Furthermore, I strongly denounce the harsh and aggressive language used by many forum participants. Far too many have shown no regard for the long-term health and reputation of AAVE; they have instead used this platform to vent personal anger and frustration.
I now call on everyone — Stani, core contributors, delegates, and every active community member — to engage in honest self-criticism. Let us all reflect: Have our words and actions truly served the protocol, or have they been driven by short-term emotions and personal agendas? The token price and the trust of thousands of holders have already paid the price.It is still not too late. By choosing compromise, private dialogue, and collective maturity over public confrontation, we can emerge stronger and more united than before.The future of AAVE is far more important than any single proposal or personal victory.
Thank you for reading. I remain a concerned but hopeful AAVE holder who believes in this protocol’s potential.
Best regards,
A Concerned AAVE Community Member
Aave Community,
Thank you for your participation in the Temp Check vote on the Aave Will Win Framework. The volume of feedback across the forum and in the vote itself has been substantial, and we have read every comment and post carefully.
The Temp Check has passed, though we recognize there are many improvements based on feedback to be made to get the proposal to its final stage.
We’d like to reiterate that this is the beginning of the process, with ARFC and AIP votes still ahead. Between now and then, we will make structural improvements to the proposal based on the feedback received so far and add the necessary detail to each section in the ARFC version. Your input remains valuable whether you voted this time or not.
The goal is a token-centric model that positions Aave for the next decade of growth. Aave’s governance process exists to make sure we get there the right way, and we look forward to continuing this work with the community as we prepare the ARFC.
They did the same with me.
Anybody that is not in line with the main narrative pushed by ACI is targeted as a “fake account”.
In my case they also threatened to kick me out of the forum because they didn’t like my phrasing, while at the same time there are accounts posting various type of direct insults and threats, using foul language, that are considered completely ok and are actually rewarded.
Disappointing to say the least.
Thanks for reading through all the feedback.
I voted No and hopefully a YES soon after new changes. So, I’m looking forward to the ARFC with a clear summary of what changed, clearer success metrics for v4 and other Aave products, and a concrete rollout and deprecation plan for v3. Also please work with other SPs like @TokenLogic @LlamaRisk @ACI , reach out to them please and bring them onboard, especially around making sure the DAO owns everything it paid for like IP, repos, domains, and other operational assets. On budget, Please consider asking for a smaller amount or a quarterly phased KPI based approach with breakdown. Other than that, lets move on.
Quick question to you @AaveLabs , have you already mapped out how Umbrella will work in v4? We should have that nailed down before v4 approval since safety is always first. I’m sure @LlamaRisk and @ChaosLabs will be working on them and taking on even more responsibility as well for v4 so their budgets will also increase a lot next time since they will be managing two protocols. I will be okay will dual budget proposals from them, one for v3 and a new one for v4 safety and risks.
Okay, that’s all I had, stay safe friends…
Can someone tell me why AAVE holder cannot vote as they wish? Why the token holders will vote for YAE on every ACI consortium proposals but NAY to AAVE lab?
I do not see too much difference when it comes money. The difference to us is AAVE lab at least is delivering and is lead by the founder of AAVE protocol. AAVE Lab are also the largest holders of AAVE token which align their interest to general token holders in a certain sense. The risk of ACI and ACI consortium SP to milk the AAVE DAO treasury is higher as they do not have much AAVE tokens but controls the daily ops of AAVE protocol.
The Temp Check passed 622K YAE to 497K NAY. Here’s what the vote actually showed.
Remove three Labs-linked addresses from the YAE side:
and the result flips: 387K YAE to 497K NAY. The community rejected the proposal. Labs overrode it on their own $51M budget request.
luggis.eth (123K VP) voted YAE on the general direction but conditioned his support on:
No lock-in with Labs. All IP, repositories, domains, and operational assets transferred to the DAO.
If Labs doesn’t deliver, the DAO needs to be able to move on.
100% revenue needs guardrails, otherwise it’s too elastic.
Phased capital deployment with detailed budget breakdown.
These are our four conditions restated by someone who voted the other way. The direction has support. The terms don’t.
Stani announced the result on X with replies restricted to accounts he follows. The founder of a decentralized protocol declared victory on a contested governance vote and disabled public comment.
We raised the issues. We published the accountability report and outlined four conditions. None were addressed. The Temp Check passed on the back of the requester’s own votes. The dice are loaded.
Continuing to negotiate inside a process where the outcome is predetermined does one thing: it gives that process legitimacy it hasn’t earned. We won’t do that.
The data is on the record. The four conditions still stand. If Labs wants to address them, they know where to find them. We’re done asking.
I would like to point out that it is not true that Areta’s 75K is delegated entirely by Stani.
You are right, can be easily checked with this great tool. https://dune.com/queries/2730359/4543948?Enter+Address_t6c1ea=0x8659D0BB123Da6D16D9394C7838BA286c2207d0E&Enter+Address_t6f0df=0x8b37a5Af68D315cf5A64097D96621F64b5502a22
You can see that a wallet with 116k in total VP of which 75k are deleagted to Areta. The rest are other much smaller people delegating to Areta, like you for example I assume.
This analysis misses some community members who didn’t end up being able to for technical reasons.
A number of funds with material AAVE positions, Blockchain Capital included, hold tokens at a custodian that had deprecated Snapshot support. Because the Snapshot was already live and governance stake was frozen, we weren’t able to delegate during the vote. We were planning on signaling Yae in support of moving the Aave Labs proposal forward in the governance process, and had we and other institutional investors at this custodian had not been limited, we believe the proposal would have succeeded by a materially larger margin.
If a diehard fanatic and long time holder like me has finally lost patience and sold everything you need to realize that you will soon be left entirely alone with the ashes of what you built. Everyone is wide awake to the cheap political games you are playing and the echo chamber propaganda you keep pushing on X. I have closed every single one of my Aave positions with a marginal profit and I absolutely refuse to buy back in until a genuinely fair proposal is put on the table.
Just think about this for a second. This many people cannot be wrong. This many people cannot be hallucinating. The independent developers the venture capitalists and the very core of the community are all telling you that you are making a massive mistake. Yet your sheer greed for power and money continues to blind you to reality. You seem to have forgotten that no one in DeFi is indispensable and there are plenty of hungry competitors waiting to take your crown. Aave Labs instead of just hyping each other up behind closed doors you should have genuinely listened to the community the DAO and the delegates who put you here. You say all the right things in public but the actual proposal you force through is a completely different deceptive game.
The panicked Stani and AAVE Labs believed ACI wanted to seize control of AAVE,but they never intended to do so. ACI was genuinely committed to AAVE’s development.
Conversely, Stani and AAVE Labs prioritized controlling and exploiting AAVE, engaging in despicable and shameless acts. Ignoring criticism from the community, they used their voting power to forcefully push through proposals that funded them, effectively draining the AAVE DAO.
AAVE Labs and Stani will be forever condemned in the annals of blockchain history!
2 cents about Aave Will Win Framework
1st cent, Entrepreneurs VS Contractors
Although routing all of product layer revenue to the DAO is a good deal for $AAVE holders, I think it is building the wrong long-term incentives:
It soft-forces devs to get the DAO’s blessing or funding before building products on top of the protocol. The protocol doesn’t need these products to function, they increase accessibility to Aave and take a fee for that service. Aave remains permissionless but economically fenced as the DAO subsidizes “official” products making it hard for independent devs to compete. Turning devs from Entrepreneurs to Contractors and Lobbists as they secure funding through DAO votes rather than the success of their product in the free market.
Development should be market driven, bottom-up.
The fact that aave,com has become the main UI to interact with Aave, doesnt mean Aave needs aave,com to be successful. It means there arent enough competing Aave interfaces. There shouldnt be an “official” interface. As base-layer infrastructure, Aave should remain neutral.
The proposal doesnt seek to stop technical access to Aave, rather trying to control it through economic and social capture. IMO, this is not the spirit Aave or Defi was built with, it doesnt solve the ‘free loader’ issue and increases brain drain risk.
As outlined in the temp check, the DAO cannot legally own and protect a trade mark. I don’t think this is a responsibility of the DAO either, the DAO owns the protocol, the protocol functions and has economies of scale regardless of its branding, changing the name or logo wont stop it from winning. If we instead, in fear of confusion, attribute too much power and control to a central entity - the foundation - we increase centralization risk and risk of malicious/regulatory takeovers regardless of how well intentioned the proposal is.
2nd Cent, DAO Investment Allocations
The temp check article argues that if the DAO receives all product revenue, the DAO would need to allocate resources like a traditional financial institution. I disagree with this and think the current system works better:
Tradfi institutions need to aggressively fund development because they work in permissioned systems.
$AAVE holders don’t lose from independent builders, they expand the ecosystem and bring new users by building on top of public infrastructure.
The incentive is much higher for independent devs with good ideas to come and build if they fully profit from their efforts as entrepreneurs using public infrastructure rather than contractors working for a DAO.
TLDR: AAVE SHOULD STAY INFRASTRUCTURE, NOT BECOME A PLATFORM.
A PROTOCOL, NOT A PRODUCT.
@M4rch1 where you been? I’ve been pushing for exactly this since the troubles began but it didn’t catch on. The protocol doesn’t need an official frontend, an official domain name, or even a brand. The DAO instead demanded all of those things, got them, and now they’re mad.
@setaavefree Not super active in governance, was my first reply on here actually, I assume a lot of people like me are opinionated but no time to argue online about it unfortunately.
Think these points are catching on or are we alone here?
Nobody seems to like the “let a protocol be a protocol” idea. Instead they want anyone building on the protocol to give 100% of their revenue to the DAO and beg for lunch money after producing endless reports and disclosures. Antithesis of smart contract composability.
what you guys are saying makes sense to me
