Subscribe to blockful blog
blockful blogHow $3.6M in Liquidations Made $BAL Melt 50% in 2 Hours
Once you become large enough, price ceases to be an external signal and becomes a reflection of yourself.
blockful blogLessons from Arbitrum DAO: The Architecture of Governance
Difficult actions are often the price of necessary change.
blockful blogSporkDAO's 2026 Board Election: A Governance Security Analysis
And the attacker... apparently didn't want to actually attack or capture the DAO.
<100 subscribers
blockful blogHow $3.6M in Liquidations Made $BAL Melt 50% in 2 Hours
Once you become large enough, price ceases to be an external signal and becomes a reflection of yourself.
blockful blogLessons from Arbitrum DAO: The Architecture of Governance
Difficult actions are often the price of necessary change.
blockful blogSporkDAO's 2026 Board Election: A Governance Security Analysis
And the attacker... apparently didn't want to actually attack or capture the DAO.
Subscribe to blockful blog
<100 subscribers
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
"I have been in every room in the house, I have frightened the housekeeper into hysterics, I have assumed various disguises, and yet all my efforts have been in vain. I am the ghost of this house, and I shall remain so." – From Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost
This week, one of the most relevant proposals for the ecosystem went to a vote: Aave Will Win. If approved, it will pay $47.5M and 75,000 $AAVE to Aave Labs to continue the development and launch of Aave v4, routes all Aave-branded product revenue to treasury, and approves brand-protection plan.
1. Summary Aave began with the thesis that decentralized lending could play a major role in traditional finance. Eight years later, that thesis has been validated. Aave is the largest protocol in decentralized finance, commanding a 60% market share in lending. The opportunity ahead, however, is bigger than anything behind us.
![[TEMP CHECK] Aave Will Win Framework](https://img.paragraph.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=384,quality=85/https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/900e0f5bcb6ef95e9924bfb23938f0e5b4aab73698f4541b8b6864c7d3a2816c.jpg)
Its relevance is not only due to the amount of money allocated to Aave Labs, which represents 30% of the treasury. The Aave DAO community is, for the most part, against the proposal.
Since the beginning of the proposal’s discussion, the Aave Chan Initiative — led by Marc Zeller — has positioned itself against it. BGD Labs, a service provider for more than four years within the Aave DAO, has decided to stop working with Aave.
Simple summary We would like to inform the community with sufficient time in advance that, once our current engagement for services with the Aave DAO will conclude on April 1st, 2026, we will not be seeking a renewal and will cease our contribution to Aave.
There is clearly a conflict between Aave Labs and the DAO. This clash has been going on for months.
It began back in 2025, when Ezr3al — an Aave delegate — discovered that one of Aave DAO’s revenue sources had ceased to exist due to a modification made by Aave Labs to Aave’s front-end.
Since then, Aave governance has turned into a stage for a power struggle between Stani, Aave Labs, and the Aave DAO.
On February 3, ACI submitted a proposal to improve transparency and prevent conflicts of interest within the Aave DAO.
Its objective was to require active governance participants to disclose their addresses and available voting power, as well as to prohibit individuals from using their votes to approve proposals that directly benefit themselves — in such cases, they would be required to abstain.
The proposal had specific targets: Stani Kulechov and Aave Labs.
After the approval of the proposal that kept the “Aave” brand under the control of Aave Labs, ACI and several delegates already knew that Aave Labs would submit a proposal requesting a budget to launch Aave v4.
Their concern was that old wallets would be used to vote in favor of their proposal — just as they did in the proposal that kept the brand under Aave Labs’ control.
Stani and multiple members of Aave Labs opposed the proposal aimed at improving transparency and conflict-of-interest guidelines within the DAO. They argued that such measures could create confusion and friction in governance.
Stani also stated: “The whole point of token governance is to enable participation with tokens one owns, with full sovereignty.”
According to an analysis conducted by Marc Zeller from ACI, 99% of the votes against the proposal were linked to Stani Kulechov and Aave Labs.
In addition to a strategy to share revenue with the DAO and structure a Foundation controlled by the DAO to maintain the “Aave” brand, Aave Labs requested a budget of $47.5M in stablecoins and 75,000 $AAVE — equivalent to 30% of the DAO’s treasury.
Given Aave Labs' and Stani's behavior, we analyzed the addresses used in the proposal, as well as other wallets holding Aave governance tokens.
The analyzed addresses can be found in this spreadsheet. All information regarding voting power was obtained through this query.
Most of the votes in favor (600K $AAVE) come from five addresses:
0x7F4a59b7517233F0b54f26cb9FDc5587A88cd1E1: ParaFi Capital — 190K
0x2079C29Be9c8095042edB95f293B5b510203d6cE: luggis.eth — 123.6K
Areta: an address that received delegations from Stani Kulechov — 75.8K
0xdC0990910F47aD479020eD77B0d62BF738C2791a: an address with connections to Stani Kulechov’s wallet — 111K
0x388cd8A0a0e05B50307FEC7F3Ef1e8893E0b70cC: connections with Aave Team Multisig — 47.1K.
According to the addresses mapped in the research, Stani Kulechov and Aave Labs still control over 300,000 $AAVE across wallets under their control, which could be used to approve the proposal once it goes for onchain vote.
The votes are controlled by 9 different addresses, with particular emphasis on:
0xEA0C12Fd29c3fe5B1ecC82a42702196bd0De6B5A — 333,000 $AAVE and voted against the proposal to transfer the Aave brand from Aave Labs to the Aave DAO — identified as “Stani” by Nansen.
0x47ca539b3f546078d97bd851130741c6bf370100 — 84,032 $AAVE and identified as “Stani” by Nansen.
0x58ddfb3db792d2f8e2cdd5ba9726e6b932a3f5af — 40,879 $AAVE and receives delegations from an address identified as “Stani” on Nansen.
None of these addresses was used in the latest vote.
Beyond the clearer connections mentioned above, there are also addresses linked to wallets labeled as “Aave Genesis Team” and responsible for acting in Aave multisigs.
We also identified 13 addresses holding 276,610 $AAVE that received large allocations in the last months and have shown no on-chain activity beyond the initial transfers. Only one address holds stkAAVE, the staked version of the Aave DAO governance token.
One pattern we found is that 10 of the 13 addresses received transfers ranging between 14K and 39K $AAVE over the past two months. All transfers originated from Coinbase or Coinbase Prime.
However, this is common behavior when voters seek to increase their voting power without being tracked: acquiring tokens on a CEX and transferring them to previously unused addresses.
We expect to see many of these addresses, as well as others not identified in our analysis, being used to vote in favor of the on-chain proposal in case opposition gets above what is was on the Snapshot vote.
Aave is one of the most important DAOs on Ethereum. The lack of visibility on voting powers, their distribution, and coalitions, really shows at moments like this.
We are working our way into getting Aave data available at anticapture.com as soon as possible, so everyone can see where the power to choose how "Aave will win" sits.
"I have been in every room in the house, I have frightened the housekeeper into hysterics, I have assumed various disguises, and yet all my efforts have been in vain. I am the ghost of this house, and I shall remain so." – From Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost
This week, one of the most relevant proposals for the ecosystem went to a vote: Aave Will Win. If approved, it will pay $47.5M and 75,000 $AAVE to Aave Labs to continue the development and launch of Aave v4, routes all Aave-branded product revenue to treasury, and approves brand-protection plan.
1. Summary Aave began with the thesis that decentralized lending could play a major role in traditional finance. Eight years later, that thesis has been validated. Aave is the largest protocol in decentralized finance, commanding a 60% market share in lending. The opportunity ahead, however, is bigger than anything behind us.
Its relevance is not only due to the amount of money allocated to Aave Labs, which represents 30% of the treasury. The Aave DAO community is, for the most part, against the proposal.
Since the beginning of the proposal’s discussion, the Aave Chan Initiative — led by Marc Zeller — has positioned itself against it. BGD Labs, a service provider for more than four years within the Aave DAO, has decided to stop working with Aave.
Simple summary We would like to inform the community with sufficient time in advance that, once our current engagement for services with the Aave DAO will conclude on April 1st, 2026, we will not be seeking a renewal and will cease our contribution to Aave.
There is clearly a conflict between Aave Labs and the DAO. This clash has been going on for months.
It began back in 2025, when Ezr3al — an Aave delegate — discovered that one of Aave DAO’s revenue sources had ceased to exist due to a modification made by Aave Labs to Aave’s front-end.
Since then, Aave governance has turned into a stage for a power struggle between Stani, Aave Labs, and the Aave DAO.
On February 3, ACI submitted a proposal to improve transparency and prevent conflicts of interest within the Aave DAO.
Its objective was to require active governance participants to disclose their addresses and available voting power, as well as to prohibit individuals from using their votes to approve proposals that directly benefit themselves — in such cases, they would be required to abstain.
The proposal had specific targets: Stani Kulechov and Aave Labs.
After the approval of the proposal that kept the “Aave” brand under the control of Aave Labs, ACI and several delegates already knew that Aave Labs would submit a proposal requesting a budget to launch Aave v4.
Their concern was that old wallets would be used to vote in favor of their proposal — just as they did in the proposal that kept the brand under Aave Labs’ control.
Stani and multiple members of Aave Labs opposed the proposal aimed at improving transparency and conflict-of-interest guidelines within the DAO. They argued that such measures could create confusion and friction in governance.
Stani also stated: “The whole point of token governance is to enable participation with tokens one owns, with full sovereignty.”
According to an analysis conducted by Marc Zeller from ACI, 99% of the votes against the proposal were linked to Stani Kulechov and Aave Labs.
In addition to a strategy to share revenue with the DAO and structure a Foundation controlled by the DAO to maintain the “Aave” brand, Aave Labs requested a budget of $47.5M in stablecoins and 75,000 $AAVE — equivalent to 30% of the DAO’s treasury.
Given Aave Labs' and Stani's behavior, we analyzed the addresses used in the proposal, as well as other wallets holding Aave governance tokens.
The analyzed addresses can be found in this spreadsheet. All information regarding voting power was obtained through this query.
Most of the votes in favor (600K $AAVE) come from five addresses:
0x7F4a59b7517233F0b54f26cb9FDc5587A88cd1E1: ParaFi Capital — 190K
0x2079C29Be9c8095042edB95f293B5b510203d6cE: luggis.eth — 123.6K
Areta: an address that received delegations from Stani Kulechov — 75.8K
0xdC0990910F47aD479020eD77B0d62BF738C2791a: an address with connections to Stani Kulechov’s wallet — 111K
0x388cd8A0a0e05B50307FEC7F3Ef1e8893E0b70cC: connections with Aave Team Multisig — 47.1K.
According to the addresses mapped in the research, Stani Kulechov and Aave Labs still control over 300,000 $AAVE across wallets under their control, which could be used to approve the proposal once it goes for onchain vote.
The votes are controlled by 9 different addresses, with particular emphasis on:
0xEA0C12Fd29c3fe5B1ecC82a42702196bd0De6B5A — 333,000 $AAVE and voted against the proposal to transfer the Aave brand from Aave Labs to the Aave DAO — identified as “Stani” by Nansen.
0x47ca539b3f546078d97bd851130741c6bf370100 — 84,032 $AAVE and identified as “Stani” by Nansen.
0x58ddfb3db792d2f8e2cdd5ba9726e6b932a3f5af — 40,879 $AAVE and receives delegations from an address identified as “Stani” on Nansen.
None of these addresses was used in the latest vote.
Beyond the clearer connections mentioned above, there are also addresses linked to wallets labeled as “Aave Genesis Team” and responsible for acting in Aave multisigs.
We also identified 13 addresses holding 276,610 $AAVE that received large allocations in the last months and have shown no on-chain activity beyond the initial transfers. Only one address holds stkAAVE, the staked version of the Aave DAO governance token.
One pattern we found is that 10 of the 13 addresses received transfers ranging between 14K and 39K $AAVE over the past two months. All transfers originated from Coinbase or Coinbase Prime.
However, this is common behavior when voters seek to increase their voting power without being tracked: acquiring tokens on a CEX and transferring them to previously unused addresses.
We expect to see many of these addresses, as well as others not identified in our analysis, being used to vote in favor of the on-chain proposal in case opposition gets above what is was on the Snapshot vote.
Aave is one of the most important DAOs on Ethereum. The lack of visibility on voting powers, their distribution, and coalitions, really shows at moments like this.
We are working our way into getting Aave data available at anticapture.com as soon as possible, so everyone can see where the power to choose how "Aave will win" sits.
1 comment
Good sleuthing. Tracking this battle and outcome is valuable to the entire ecosystem.