Aave DAO Votes to Consolidate All Revenue Under AAVE Token

The Aave DAO on Sunday approved the first binding component of the “Aave Will Win” framework, which founder Stani Kulechov calls “the most important proposal in Aave’s history,” directing 100% of revenue from all Aave-branded products to the DAO treasury and consolidating economic rights under the AAVE token.

The vote closed with roughly 75% support, a significantly stronger result than the initial Temp Check in early March, which narrowly cleared amid concerns that Aave Labs-linked addresses had tipped the balance.

The approved package includes a $25 million stablecoin grant from the DAO’s Collector Contract, split between an immediate $5 million allowance and streamed payments over six and 12 months, plus 75,000 AAVE tokens vesting linearly over 48 months from the Ecosystem Reserve, double the timeline outlined in the original temp check.

In exchange, Aave Labs commits to routing all revenue from Aave Pro, the Aave App, Horizon, Aave Kit, and swaps on aave.com to the DAO treasury, a stream that Kulechov said is already generating $10 to $20 million on top of protocol revenue, which hit $140 million in 2025.

“If you own AAVE, you own not just the economic rights of the protocol, but the brand, the users, and the integrations,” Kulechov wrote on X, laying out an ambitious multi-year roadmap spanning consumer products, fintech integrations, and regulatory licensing.

The proposal resolves a governance crisis that erupted in December when a delegate discovered that Aave Labs had been redirecting roughly $200,000 per week in interface fees, previously flowing to the DAO, to itself via a CowSwap integration. That controversy spiraled into a broader confrontation over tokenholder rights, brand ownership, and the power balance between Labs and the DAO.

The fallout was severe. BGD Labs, one of the core teams working on Aave V3, announced its departure in February. The Aave Chan Initiative followed in early March. And last week, risk management firm Chaos Labs became the third major contributor to exit.

The AAVE token has lost roughly 75% of its value since its August 2025 high near $356, though it rallied approximately 5% following the vote to trade near $95.

The vote comes just two weeks after Aave V4 launched on Ethereum mainnet, introducing a hub-and-spoke architecture that allows independent lending markets to share liquidity through a unified system. The framework formally ratifies V4 as the protocol’s long-term technical foundation.

Under the new framework, Kulechov outlined a zero-tolerance policy on “value leakage,” requiring that all service providers build exclusively for Aave with measurable performance goals.

Aave is DeFi’s largest lending protocol with roughly $25 billion in total value locked across multiple chains.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.