The prolonged governance battle that began 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 crucial in Aave's history by its founder, has been approved, establishing a framework that channels 100% of revenue from all Aave-branded products back to the DAO and consolidates economic rights under the AAVE token.

This significant shift implies that the DAO will now be responsible for funding Aave Labs' activities, with the approved proposal including a $25 million stablecoin grant and a 5,000 AAVE token allocation to Aave Labs. Aave DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, oversees the Aave lending protocol, enabling 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 with a landslide, outlining the future roadmap: Aave will become fully token-centric, with one asset and one model - $AAVE.

The vote resolves a dispute that surfaced in December when delegates noticed that the integration of CoWSwap into Aave's interface had quietly shifted swap-related fees away from the community treasury to an external recipient, exposing a deeper tension over control of the protocol's most valuable asset - its user-facing products and the revenue they generate. The 'Aave Will Win' proposal decisively favors 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 are already generating $10 to $20 million in additional 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' that includes $1 million account protection per user and a card launching later, which will generate 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 zero 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 turns 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 also plans to invest in agentic AI infrastructure for developers building on Aave.

With roughly $25 billion in total value locked across multiple chains, making it the largest lending protocol in DeFi, and an annual revenue figure of $140 million, Aave is positioned alongside Uniswap and Lido as one of the few protocols generating nine-figure income. The stated target is to scale from $40 billion to $1 trillion, with Aave envisioned not as a bank but as 'a financial network that any fintech, bank, or asset manager can plug into.'