The prolonged governance battle that started when Aave Labs diverted swap fees from the DAO treasury has come to an end, with the community voting in favor of the proposal. The 'Aave Will Win' proposal, deemed the most significant in Aave's history by founder Stani Kulechov, has been approved, establishing a framework that redirects all revenue from Aave-branded products back to the DAO and consolidates economic rights under the AAVE token. This shift assigns the DAO the responsibility of funding Aave Labs' activities, with the approved proposal including a $25 million stablecoin grant and a 5,000 AAVE token allocation to Aave Labs.
The Aave DAO, a governance system managing the Aave lending protocol, enables token holders to vote on key decisions such as upgrades, fees, and treasury use, effectively serving as the community-driven decision-making body for the protocol. The Aave Will Win proposal has been passed, outlining a roadmap for the future: Aave will become fully token-centric, with one asset and one model - $AAVE.
The vote resolves a controversy that emerged in December when delegates discovered that the integration of CoWSwap into Aave's interface had quietly shifted swap-related fees away from the community treasury. This dispute exposed a deeper tension over whether Aave Labs or the DAO controlled the protocol's most valuable asset: its user-facing products and the revenue they generate. The Aave Will Win proposal decisively resolves this issue in favor of token holders, with protocol revenue, which reached $140 million in 2025 and is expected to match that in 2026, now supplemented by application-layer revenue from Aave Pro, Aave App, Horizon, and Aave Kit.
Swaps on Aave.com and Aave Pro already generate an additional $10 to $20 million in revenue on top of existing protocol fees. The application layer is where the ambition lies, with Aave App targeting mainstream users with a 'fintech-like experience' featuring $1 million account protection per user and a card that will be launched later, generating fees for the treasury. The proposal takes a firm stance against 'value leakage,' the issue that triggered the December dispute, requiring service providers to build exclusively for Aave, with no tolerance for relationship gating or products built at the expense of token holders. Every service provider will have measurable goals, and governance process improvements are planned to reduce 'politics and friction.' On the technical side, Aave V4's reinvestment feature transforms idle float capital in lending pools into yield-generating positions, creating an additional revenue stream that did not exist in V3.
New 'Spokes' expand collateral options and address the demand side of DeFi liquidity, while the team plans to invest in agentic AI infrastructure for developers building on Aave. With roughly $25 billion in total value locked across multiple chains, Aave is the largest lending protocol in DeFi, and its $140 million annual revenue figure puts it alongside Uniswap and Lido as one of the few protocols generating nine-figure income.
Kulechov's stated target is to scale from $40 billion to $1 trillion, positioning Aave not as a bank but as 'a financial network that any fintech, bank, or asset manager can plug into.'