The prolonged governance battle that began when Aave Labs redirected swap fees away from the DAO treasury has come to an end, with the community voting in favor of the 'Aave Will Win' proposal. This proposal, deemed the most significant in Aave's history by its founder, Stani Kulechov, establishes a framework that redirects 100% of revenue from all Aave-branded products back to the DAO, consolidating economic rights under the AAVE token. As a result, the DAO will now be responsible for funding Aave Labs' activities, and the proposal has approved a $25 million stablecoin grant and a 5,000 AAVE token allocation to Aave Labs. The Aave DAO, a community-run decision-making body for the protocol, manages the Aave lending protocol, enabling token holders to vote on key decisions such as upgrades, fees, and treasury use.
The 'Aave Will Win' proposal has been passed with a landslide victory, outlining a master plan that includes making Aave fully token-centric, with one asset and one model: $AAVE. This move 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. The controversy highlighted a deeper tension over whether Aave Labs or the DAO controlled the protocol's most valuable assets: its user-facing products and the revenue they generate.
The 'Aave Will Win' proposal decisively answers this question in favor of token holders, with protocol revenue, which reached $140 million in 2025 and is expected to match that in 2026, now being supplemented by application-layer revenue from Aave Pro, Aave App, Horizon, and Aave Kit. Swaps on Aave.com and Aave Pro are already generating an additional $10 to $20 million in revenue on top of existing protocol fees.
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. Technically, Aave V4's reinvestment feature will turn idle float capital in lending pools into yield-generating positions, creating an additional revenue stream.
New 'Spokes' will expand collateral options and address the demand side of DeFi liquidity, and 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 target is to scale from $40 billion to $1 trillion, positioning Aave as a financial network that any fintech, bank, or asset manager can plug into, rather than a bank.