Historical report based on Jae’s PANews article, published December 23, 2025, at 16:00 UTC+8. Figures and voting status below reflect that reporting date.
A dispute over fees from Aave’s trading interface became a broader fight over who controls a decentralized protocol’s commercial identity: its token holders or its development company.
At the time of PANews’ report, Aave held roughly $34 billion in locked assets. The dispute centered not on those deposits, but on the ownership of interface revenue, branding and distribution channels—and whether AAVE governance extended to those assets.
A frontend change opens a revenue dispute
On December 4, 2025, Aave Labs announced that the swap service on its official interface, app.aave.com, would move from ParaSwap to CoWSwap, citing better pricing and protection against maximal extractable value, or MEV.
According to PANews, community representative EzR3aL subsequently traced transaction fees that, after the change, went to a Labs-controlled address rather than the DAO treasury. Based on historical activity, the estimated annualized revenue at issue was $10 million. That was an estimate of potential yearly revenue, not a documented $10 million treasury withdrawal.
Community leader Marc Zeller characterized the arrangement as an implicit privatization of brand assets: in his view, Labs was monetizing technology and brand value developed with DAO support.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov offered a different boundary. He argued that the DAO owned the smart-contract protocol, while Labs held the commercial rights to the interface it built and maintained. Previous payments to the DAO, he said, had been voluntary donations.
The disagreement exposed two competing understandings of AAVE governance. One treated the protocol and its commercial interface as distinct businesses. The other expected token holders to retain authority over the wider ecosystem’s economic value.
Community concerns also extended to future revenue from Aave V4, the GHO stablecoin and the Horizon RWA initiative. Those were questions about what could happen, not evidence that similar revenue diversions had occurred in those projects.
From fee sharing to ownership claims
On December 15, a user named tulipking introduced what PANews described as a “poison pill” proposal. It called for:
- Transferring Labs’ code repositories, intellectual property and trademarks to the DAO, backed by the threat of litigation.
- Giving the DAO 100% ownership of Labs, turning it into a wholly owned subsidiary and making its founder and staff DAO employees.
- Recovering historical frontend revenue earned through the Aave brand.
The proposal was temporarily shelved on procedural grounds. It did not establish that the DAO had the legal power to compel those transfers.
Former Aave CTO Ernesto Boado advanced a narrower proposal, “Phase 1—Ownership,” seeking DAO control of assets including aave.com and other domains, official X and Discord accounts, and GitHub repositories.
Boado argued that decentralization should encompass these “soft assets,” not just smart contracts. He proposed a DAO-controlled legal entity to hold them, giving the community an ownership structure capable of operating within traditional legal jurisdictions.
Token losses and a contested vote
PANews reported that Aave’s approximately $34 billion in locked assets had not fluctuated significantly, even as AAVE fell more than 25% over two weeks. Protocol usage and token valuation were therefore showing different outcomes during the dispute.
On December 22, an address described in the report as the second-largest AAVE holder sold its position. It had accumulated approximately 230,000 AAVE at an average price near $223 and exited at around $165, implying an estimated loss of $13.45 million. PANews interpreted the sale as a sign of concern about governance and value capture; the transaction itself did not establish the holder’s motivation.
The procedural dispute intensified when Labs moved Boado’s proposal to a Snapshot vote without his consent, according to the report.
Crypto commentator 0xTodd raised two objections: the December 23–26 voting window overlapped with Christmas holidays, potentially reducing participation, and the proposal was still being discussed. He said discussion threads typically underwent three to six months of communication and refinement before voting.
Kulechov countered that the new ARFC proposal vote complied with the governance framework and that voting was the appropriate way to settle the disagreement.
At publication, PANews reported that support stood at just 3%. That was an interim reading, not a final result.
Regulatory news did not settle the ownership question
The report also stated that the US Securities and Exchange Commission ended a four-year investigation on December 20 without taking enforcement action against Aave. PANews described this as widely interpreted as tacit acceptance of Aave’s decentralized governance model; that interpretation was separate from the reported enforcement outcome.
Meanwhile, Kulechov had purchased a combined $15 million in AAVE, with reported unrealized losses exceeding $2 million, and announced a “three-pillar” strategy intended to rebuild consensus. Some community members questioned whether the purchases were also intended to increase his voting power. The report did not establish that motive.
A possible hybrid model—not an agreed settlement
PANews framed Boado’s ownership proposal as a possible route toward a hybrid organization: the DAO would control the brand and distribution assets, while Labs would operate as an authorized professional service provider.
Under that interpretation, frontend fees and any revenue-sharing arrangement would be governed by explicit agreements rather than voluntary contributions. This remained a proposed direction, not an adopted operating model.
The article also acknowledged the competing risks. Removing commercial incentives could weaken Labs’ motivation to develop V4, while DAO ownership of brand assets could create practical difficulties in responding to legal disputes. These were prospective concerns, not demonstrated outcomes.
PANews drew a parallel with the controversy over Uniswap Labs’ frontend fees in 2023, describing that episode as a negotiation over the boundary between Labs’ commercial rights and protocol decentralization.
For Aave, the unresolved question was more specific than whether DAOs work: does governance over a protocol also confer ownership of its brand, interface and revenue channels? The dispute showed why those boundaries matter to the governance-token narrative—and why control of smart contracts alone does not resolve them.
