Aave Founder Says $15M Token Buy Wasn’t Used in Controversial DAO Vote

Stani Kulechov, the founder and CEO of Aave Labs, the main development company behind the Aave decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol, denied claims that he recently purchased $15 million of Aave (AAVE) tokens to influence a controversial community vote that failed to pass. 

“These tokens were not used to vote on the recent proposal, and that was never my intention. This is my life’s work, and I am putting my own capital behind my conviction,” Kulechov said.

He also said that Aave Labs has not clearly communicated the economic alignment between it and Aave token holders. “In the future, we’ll be more explicit about how products built by Aave Labs create value for the DAO and AAVE token holders,” he added.

Several members of the Aave community accused Kulechov of buying Aave tokens to tilt the governance vote in favor of Aave Labs by increasing his voting stake.

Cointelegraph reached out to Kulechov for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

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Controversy erupts in the Aave community over intellectual property rights

Kulechov’s comments followed the results of a community vote to bring Aave’s brand assets under the control of the Aave decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), the community-led organization that governs the Aave DeFi protocol.

The proposal was submitted for community review after EzR3aL, a psysdonomous Aave DAO member, said that fees from a recent integration with decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator CoW Swap were directed to a wallet address controlled by Aave Labs.

The fees, which are generated from crypto asset swaps using CoW Swap, rightly belong to the DAO, and the DAO should have been consulted before the fees were redirected, EzR3aL argued, igniting a firestorm of community pushback against Aave Labs.

Over 55% voted “nay” on the proposal, and over 41% abstained from voting while only 3.5% of the community voted in favor of the proposal.

However, even before the vote concluded, Aave DAO members voiced frustration, saying that the vote was rushed and normal community governance procedures were ignored.

Ernesto Boado, a former chief technical officer at Aave Labs, is listed as the author of the proposal. 

However, he said the proposal was listed without his knowledge or consent and that he would not have approved submitting it had he been consulted before it was published.

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