Aave community has voted to fund its core development team and reshape how the entire protocol earns money, ending months of internal conflict with a decision its founder called the most important in the protocol’s history.
The Aave DAO approved the “Aave Will Win” (AWW) framework on Saturday, April 12, granting Aave Labs $25 million in stablecoins and an allocation of 75,000 AAVE tokens, worth roughly $6.8 million, to fund operations and product development. The vote passed with nearly 75% in favor, according to the Aave governance dashboard (Proposal #469). The $25 million stablecoin grant will be disbursed in installments over 12 months, while the token allocation vests linearly over four years.
What the vote actually decided
The bigger shift is structural. Under AWW, 100% of revenue from Aave-branded products, including Aave App, Aave Pro, and Horizon, its institutional real-world asset market, now flows directly to the DAO treasury rather than being retained by Aave Labs. In exchange, the DAO funds Labs’ operations. Additional elements tied to growth grants and product milestones will proceed through separate governance proposals.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov wrote on X following the vote: “If you own AAVE, you own not just the economic rights of the protocol, but the brand, the users, and the integrations. This is the direction we are committing to, a multi-year journey.”
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The revenue story behind the vote
Aave is already DeFi’s most commercially successful lending protocol. Its total value locked exceeds $25 billion according to DeFiLlama, and it commands roughly 60% market share in decentralized lending. Protocol revenue hit $140 million in 2025, with 2026 tracking at a similar pace. On top of that, swaps on Aave.com and Aave Pro are generating between $10 million and $20 million annually in application-layer revenue, money that, until now, did not consistently flow to the DAO treasury. That gap is exactly what triggered the months of friction leading up to this vote.
The framework also ratifies Aave V4 as the protocol’s long-term technical foundation. V4’s reinvestment feature turns idle capital in lending pools into yield-generating positions, creating a new revenue stream that did not exist in V3. Kulechov has set an ambitious public target: scaling Aave from $40 billion to $1 trillion in assets.
A fight that started last December
This vote was not clean or quick. The dispute traces back to late 2025, when delegates discovered that swap fees from trading aggregator CoWSwap, integrated into Aave’s interface, had quietly been redirected away from the DAO treasury. That controversy exposed a deeper tension: who actually controls Aave’s user-facing products and brand. In January 2026, a separate proposal to transfer brand assets and intellectual property to the DAO outright failed, deepening community divisions.
The AWW framework passed a temperature check on March 1 with a narrow 52.58% margin, enough to trigger the exit of one of Aave’s most influential governance groups. The Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), which drove 61% of governance actions over three years and helped grow the GHO stablecoin from $35 million to $527 million, announced it would wind down.
What changes now
Aave Labs commits under the new framework to working exclusively on Aave-related products. Service providers must now demonstrate measurable results to receive DAO funding. As Kulechov stated on X: “Payments for posting governance proposals are over.” The DAO will also establish an Aave Foundation to hold trademarks and intellectual property, a necessary step since decentralized organizations cannot directly own IP under most legal frameworks.
“Fintechs are entering DeFi, institutions are coming on-chain, and regulatory clarity is emerging in certain markets that allows us to go directly to consumers,” Aave Labs said in the proposal. “The protocols that win the next decade will be those that move fast, build great tools and products and capture new markets before competitors.”
