Aave governance rift deepens as major governance group exits $26 billion DeFi protocol

The Aave Chan Initiative, one of the most active governance groups inside the Aave DAO, announced its shutdown after a dispute over transparency and voting power tied to a record budget request from Aave Labs.

Marc Zeller, founder of ACI, announced that the eight-person team will not seek renewal of its contract and will wind down operations over the next four months. The group plans to continue participating in governance during that period while handing off infrastructure and open-sourcing its tools.

The exit marks a turning point for Aave, the leading decentralized finance protocol with nearly $27 billion in total value locked across 20 blockchains.

It comes weeks after BGD Labs, the team that built and maintained Aave’s V3 codebase, said it would also step away over organizational and strategic disagreements with Aave Labs.

Aave’s governance token, AAVE, is down more than 11% in the last 24 hours over ACI’s exit to now trade at $110. It’s down more than 44% in the past year, compared to BTC’s 24% drop in the same period.

ACI’s impact

ACI said it drove 61% of governance actions over the past three years and helped deploy $101 million in incentives. During that time, Aave’s GHO stablecoin grew from $35 million to $527 million in supply, and the protocol’s DeFi market share rose above 65%, according to the group’s figures. ACI said it cost the DAO $4.6 million over three years.

The conflict centers on a proposal from Aave Labs titled “Aave Will Win.” The plan asked the DAO to approve up to roughly $51 million in stablecoins and 75,000 AAVE tokens to fund product development, marketing and expansion tied to Aave V4.

It also proposed directing all of the revenue from Aave-branded products to the DAO. That proposal has passed its first formal vote over the weekend with around 52% supporting it.

ACI said it requested four conditions before supporting the proposal, including stricter onchain milestone tracking and limits on self-voting by addresses linked to the budget recipient. Those conditions went unaddressed, Zeller wrote.

The organization argued that addresses linked to Aave Labs voted on the proposal, ultimately tipping the outcome in their favor. In a post-mortem published on the governance forum, the group said the episode showed there is “no role for an independent service provider” if the largest budget recipient can influence its own approval without full disclosure.

Aave Labs has not yet issued a response to ACI’s exit.

Winding down

To settle its remaining obligations, ACI will submit a direct proposal to cancel its GHO funding stream and transfer 120 days of funding to its treasury address, with the rest returning to the DAO.

The group said it chose a lump sum approach because it does not trust the governance process to maintain its stream during the transition. After the proposal executes, ACI will also cut its own AAVE vesting stream.

Over the next four months, ACI plans to hand off or open-source the systems it built. These include governance dashboards, incentive frameworks, delegate coordination programs and its roles on committees such as the Aave Liquidity Committee and GHO Stewards. The group will step down from those posts at the end of the wind-down period.

The departure raises broader questions about decentralization inside large DAOs. In theory, token holders control the system yet, in practice, voting power often clusters around founders, early investors and large delegates.

If a single entity holds enough influence, critics say, independent oversight becomes hard to sustain. The decentralization question in Aave began to grow after the DAO started debating who controls the protocol’s interface and who benefits financially from it.

For Aave users, lending and borrowing will continue as normal. Smart contracts remain live, and other service providers such as Chaos Labs, TokenLogic, and Certora continue their roles.

Still, the loss of two major contributors in quick succession may shift how the DAO manages risk, budgets and future upgrades.