Subscribe to Holonic Horizons
<100 subscribers
Most governance proposals fail for the same reason: they refuse to acknowledge the paradox at the heart of the organization.
In Aave's recent crisis, both sides offered "solutions." Labs said, "Let us operate freely." The DAO said, "Give us control." Both were solving for the wrong problem, because both were trying to eliminate the paradox rather than engineer it.
The real problem is not political. It is architectural. It is the result of building an organization on implicit tension and then watching that tension snap under load.
This document diagnoses that failure and proposes a structural solution based on a principle discovered in physics and biology: Tensegrity—the art of maintaining integrity through balanced opposing forces.
Every organization is defined by a tension that cannot be eliminated, only balanced.
At Aave, that tension is between Execution and Sovereignty.
Execution is the force of autonomy, speed, and unilateral action. It hates committees. It builds things. (Represented by Aave Labs.)
Sovereignty is the force of legitimacy, transparency, and collective consent. It hates surprise. It governs. (Represented by The Aave DAO.)
For eight years, Aave operated on an implicit understanding that these forces could coexist. Labs would execute; the DAO would govern. The tension between them was real, but it was unspoken—held together by founder charisma, shared purpose, and the assumption that both sides wanted the same outcome.
Then the implicit tension became contested.
In early December 2025, Aave Labs quietly swapped the default router on the aave.com frontend from Paraswap to CoW Swap. This redirected approximately $10 million per year in referral fees—previously flowing to the DAO treasury—into an address controlled by Labs.
The DAO discovered this through forensic on-chain analysis, not announcement.
The DAO's response: "This is extraction. The brand, the audits, the growth—we funded all of it. Why should Labs privatize the returns?" They proposed seizing Labs' IP and equity.
Labs' response: "Where were you when this was being born? When we were burning cash, fighting regulators, surviving hacks? You showed up after the bleeding was done, and now you want to own what we built?" They rejected the DAO's authority.
Who is right?
Both sides.
And that is the architectural problem. When both sides are right, the issue is not morality. It is structure.
The Founder's Rage Is Correct Labs is right that:
Founders absorbed existential risk. The protocol exists because someone took the fall when failure was likely.
Committees do not ship competitive software. Aave's dominance comes from Labs' ability to iterate, respond, and execute without bureaucratic drag.
Once operational control shifts to governance, the historical pattern is clear: Sushi, Maker, and others show the cost of losing builder autonomy. Governance friction leads to stagnation.
The DAO's Panic Is Also Correct
The DAO is right that:
They funded Aave's infrastructure. The treasury built the brand, audits, liquidity, legal defense.
Information asymmetry is a governance catastrophe. If Labs can unilaterally redirect $10M without transparency or consent, token holders have no leverage and no warning.
Without explicit boundaries, extraction is inevitable. Labs has no formal obligation to share value. Nothing prevents this from happening again—or escalating.
The Structural Truth
This conflict is not the result of bad intentions on either side. It is the inevitable result of relying on implicit tension instead of explicit structure.
As long as Aave was small and founder charisma held the system together, this worked. But as the protocol scaled, as the treasury grew to billions, as secondary actors joined governance, the implicit agreement became increasingly fragile. A single business decision exposed it completely.
This is a predictable failure mode. It will repeat in every organization built on implicit tension, regardless of how well-intentioned the actors are.
To understand the fix, we must first understand how structures actually maintain their shape under stress.
Tensegrity is an architectural principle discovered by Buckminster Fuller and Kenneth Snelson. It describes structures that maintain integrity through continuous tension balanced against discontinuous compression.
Most buildings rely on rigid supports crushing inward: massive pillars, heavy beams. They are stable when undisturbed but brittle when stressed. Remove one pillar, and the structure collapses.
A tensegrity structure works differently. It floats. Cables pull outward in continuous tension; struts push inward in discontinuous compression. The opposing forces create stability. The structure is most stable when these forces are in dynamic equilibrium.
A tensegrity dome doesn't rest on pillars. It hovers—held up by the very forces pushing and pulling against each other.
Aave was always a tensegrity structure. But it was an implicit one—its forces were unspoken and invisible.
The struts are the distinct entities that push outward, creating space. In Aave:
Strut 1: Aave Labs (The Execution Engine)
Operates through speed, autonomy, unilateral decision-making.
Must have the freedom to hire, fire, experiment, and monetize.
Its structural integrity depends on being separate from the DAO.
This is not greed; it is a functional requirement of execution.
Strut 2: The Aave DAO (The Sovereignty Engine)
Operates through transparency, deliberation, and collective consent.
Must have authority over protocol parameters, treasury, and brand.
Its structural integrity depends on being distinct from Labs.
This is not entitlement; it is a functional requirement of legitimacy.
The struts are not enemies. They are load-bearing opposites. The structure requires their separation. The moment you try to merge them ("Let's just have everyone vote on everything" or "Let Labs decide everything"), the structure loses its shape.
The cables are the forces that hold the struts together. In Aave, there were three critical cables:
Cable 1: The Social Contract An unwritten agreement that Labs would prioritize the DAO's interests and the DAO would grant Labs operational freedom. This was a handshake—dependent entirely on goodwill.
Cable 2: The Shared Narrative Stani's founding vision and the story of Aave as a public good. This narrative temporarily unified both struts toward a common purpose.
Cable 3: Economic Alignment The shared financial interest in the success of the $AAVE token. Both Labs and the DAO benefit when the protocol grows.
Why The Snap The fee-switch decision was not the cause of the conflict. It was the stress test that revealed the primary cable—the Social Contract—was fragile and unwritten.
When Labs redirected fees without transparency or consent, the DAO felt extraction. When the DAO responded with seizure proposals, Labs felt betrayal. Both interpretations were true. In that moment, the implicit tension became contested tension, and the structure snapped.
The solution is not to eliminate the tension. It is to make the tension visible, structural, and resilient.
We move from Implicit Tensegrity (held together by hope and charisma) to Explicit Tensegrity (held together by code, constitutions, and councils).
The Problem: The financial relationship is a handshake. It relies on goodwill.
The Solution: Programmatic Fee Splitter Deploy an immutable smart contract that automatically splits revenue between the DAO and Labs (e.g., 60/40) at the protocol level.
How This Works:
Every time the protocol generates fees (swaps, lending interest, etc.), the splitter automatically distributes them.
The split is visible on-chain. No one needs to ask; no one can hide.
Labs knows with certainty what its share is. The DAO knows with certainty what it controls.
The "cable" transforms from trust (soft, breakable) into code (hard, immutable).
Why This Matters Structurally: This is not about dividing money. It is about removing the daily negotiation that wears down the system. It acknowledges a deep truth: Labs needs profit to function, and the DAO needs revenue to govern. Rather than pretend this is not true, we engineer it into the structure.
The cable no longer depends on anyone being generous. It depends on mathematics.
The Problem: The operational domains of Labs and the DAO overlap and are undefined. Nobody knows where one's authority ends and the other begins.
The Solution: The Aave Constitution Draft and ratify a formal governance document (on-chain) that explicitly defines:
Labs' Sovereign Domain (Protected from DAO micromanagement):
Product roadmap and feature prioritization
Engineering architecture and technical decisions
Hiring, firing, and organizational structure
User experience optimization
Application layer monetization (within the fee-splitter limits)
DAO's Sovereign Domain (Protected from Labs unilateral action):
Protocol-level risk parameters (loan-to-value ratios, interest rates)
Treasury allocation and budget approval
IP licensing and brand partnerships
Major protocol upgrades
Governance rules themselves
Shared Decision Domains (Requiring negotiation):
Strategic pivots that affect both execution and protocol
Major revenue model changes beyond the fee-splitter
Regulatory responses
How This Works:
Labs has a "Safe Harbor." It can execute freely within its domain, knowing the DAO cannot seize it.
The DAO has "Check and Balance." It has authority over protocol governance, knowing Labs cannot unilaterally extract value.
Conflicts can now be mediated within the constitutional framework rather than escalating to existential questions like "Who owns Aave?"
Why This Matters Structurally: In tensegrity, struts must not collide. If they touch, the structure loses its shape. The Constitution prevents collision by giving each strut its own territory. It removes ambiguity. When ambiguity exists, people fight over it. When boundaries are clear, people can disagree about implementation without questioning legitimacy.
The Problem: The only existing escalation path is nuclear. When disagreement happens, it goes straight to community-wide governance votes. There is no mechanism to absorb high-stakes conflict before it becomes system-wide.
The Solution: The Constitutional Council Establish a specialized body whose role is to:
Interpret the Aave Constitution when ambiguities arise
Mediate disputes between Labs and the DAO before proposals go to community vote
Have the power to force renegotiation (not to overrule either side, but to require dialogue)
Represent both Labs and the DAO (not neutral, but balanced)
How This Works:
If Labs makes a decision that feels like extraction, the DAO can escalate to the Council (not directly to a vote).
If the DAO proposes something that handicaps Labs' execution, Labs can escalate to the Council.
The Council forces negotiation. It says, "You both have valid points. Here is what the Constitution actually says. Now work it out."
If negotiation fails, then the proposal goes to a community vote—but now the community votes with full context, not in a panic.
Why This Matters Structurally: In tensegrity structures, joints must be flexible. They absorb shock so the whole skeleton doesn't shatter. A Constitutional Council is the cartilage of the organization. It allows Aave to deform under load (to accommodate disagreement) and then return to shape (to rebalance). Without shock absorbers, any stress becomes catastrophic.
The Problem: Asymmetry of information creates paranoia. The DAO discovered the fee-switch through forensic analysis, not announcement. This signals: "We are hiding something."
The Solution: Real-Time Treasury Dashboards & 72-Hour Pre-Notice
Deploy a real-time dashboard showing all fee flows, treasury movements, and Labs' revenue streams.
Require Labs to announce any revenue-impacting decision 72 hours before implementation, allowing time for DAO objection or appeal to the Council.
How This Works:
There are no more "discovered" fee switches. Everything is announced and visible.
The DAO has time to object before implementation, preventing the sense of extraction.
Transparency removes the emotional heat of the system. Paranoia is high-energy; visibility is low-energy.
Why This Matters Structurally: In a tensegrity structure, all forces must be visible to be balanced. A hidden force creates an imbalance that propagates through the entire structure, eventually causing collapse. Automation (dashboards, pre-notice) is the cheapest way to make all forces visible at all times.
These four fixes have a shared principle: Prevolution.
Prevolution means "Pre-Evolution"—designing a system to evolve before crisis forces it.
Most organizations oscillate between two bad modes:
Revolution: Destroy the old system and start over. Fast, chaotic, usually creates new problems.
Devolution: Keep the old system but squeeze more from it. Slow, exhausting, usually makes power asymmetries worse.
Prevolution is different. It says: "We will upgrade the structure intentionally before it breaks. We will design the system to change shape under load, not to snap."
The four fixes are Prevolutionary because they:
Acknowledge tension as structural. They do not try to eliminate the Labs-DAO conflict. They formalize it.
Make evolution expected. The Constitution can be amended. The fee-splitter ratio can change. The Council's interpretation can evolve. The system is designed to grow without collapsing.
Metabolize disagreement. Instead of disagreement leading to civil war, it leads to Constitutional renegotiation. The system digests the conflict and emerges stronger.
This is how biological systems stay alive. They do not avoid stress; they are built to process stress and grow from it.
Most organizations confuse Stability (resistance to change) with Integrity (coherence under change).
A stone is stable. It does not move. But drop it in an earthquake, and it shatters.
A gymnast is in constant motion. Their limbs bend, twist, and rebalance continuously. But they can land a flip on a balance beam without falling.
The gymnast has integrity through motion. The stone has brittle stability.
Organizations usually try to be stones: fixed hierarchies, frozen roles, locked-in processes. They think stability means "no change." But in reality, rigidity creates brittleness.
Aave, using these four Prevolutionary fixes, would be an organization with integrity through motion:
The fee-splitter allows Labs to pursue profitability and the DAO to maintain revenue. Both adjust their needs continuously. The cable stays taut without breaking.
The Constitution gives both struts their space. They push against each other constantly, but they push within defined domains. The structure holds its shape.
The Council absorbs the shocks of disagreement. Conflicts don't shatter the system; they trigger rebalancing.
The transparency keeps all forces visible so imbalances can be corrected before they cascade.
The result is an organization that is stable in motion—not because it resists change, but because it is engineered to accommodate, process, and metabolize change.
If you are involved in any organization (DAO, protocol, company, nonprofit), ask yourself:
Paradox Questions (Are you naming the real tension?):
What opposing forces define your organization?
Are people trying to eliminate one of these forces, or to balance them?
What happens when you state the paradox explicitly? Do people get uncomfortable? (That discomfort is the sign you found the real problem.)
Tensegrity Questions (Are your structures visible?):
What "cables" (agreements, trust, narratives) hold your organization together?
Are these cables written down and visible, or do they exist only as "understood"?
What would happen if a key person left? Would the structure collapse?
Prevolution Questions (Are you designing for evolution?):
Where are you relying on implicit agreements instead of explicit structures?
Where is information asymmetry hidden in technical complexity?
Where are opposing forces in tension without being formalized?
Those are the places where your system is fragile. Those are the places where you are one controversial decision away from a crisis.
The good news: You can engineer your way out of that fragility. Not by eliminating the tension (tension is structural), but by making it explicit, legible, and generative.
The Aave crisis is not an ending. It is an invitation.
If the DAO and Labs can convert this conflict into a structural redesign—a programmatic fee-splitter, a Constitution, a Mediation Council, and automated transparency—they will have built the prototype for how decentralized organizations can operate without oscillating between extraction and revolution.
They will have demonstrated a new organizational form: the Deliberately Developmental Organization—one that does not fear the tension of opposing truths, but builds its very architecture upon them.
This is the path to Metamodern governance: organizations that are not just decentralized, but truly anti-fragile. Organizations that metabolize conflict into growth. Organizations that prove integrity is not the absence of tension, but the excellence of engineering.
The crisis has broken the structure. Now it is time to rebuild it better—using the principles of tensegrity, the discipline of Prevolution, and the recognition that the strongest organizations are not those that avoid paradox, but those that build themselves out of paradox.
This framework is part of the Prevolution Series, exploring how Web3 systems (and all complex organizations) can evolve beyond the extraction-backlash-disruption cycle through structural design and tensegrity engineering.
Most governance proposals fail for the same reason: they refuse to acknowledge the paradox at the heart of the organization.
In Aave's recent crisis, both sides offered "solutions." Labs said, "Let us operate freely." The DAO said, "Give us control." Both were solving for the wrong problem, because both were trying to eliminate the paradox rather than engineer it.
The real problem is not political. It is architectural. It is the result of building an organization on implicit tension and then watching that tension snap under load.
This document diagnoses that failure and proposes a structural solution based on a principle discovered in physics and biology: Tensegrity—the art of maintaining integrity through balanced opposing forces.
Every organization is defined by a tension that cannot be eliminated, only balanced.
At Aave, that tension is between Execution and Sovereignty.
Execution is the force of autonomy, speed, and unilateral action. It hates committees. It builds things. (Represented by Aave Labs.)
Sovereignty is the force of legitimacy, transparency, and collective consent. It hates surprise. It governs. (Represented by The Aave DAO.)
For eight years, Aave operated on an implicit understanding that these forces could coexist. Labs would execute; the DAO would govern. The tension between them was real, but it was unspoken—held together by founder charisma, shared purpose, and the assumption that both sides wanted the same outcome.
Then the implicit tension became contested.
In early December 2025, Aave Labs quietly swapped the default router on the aave.com frontend from Paraswap to CoW Swap. This redirected approximately $10 million per year in referral fees—previously flowing to the DAO treasury—into an address controlled by Labs.
The DAO discovered this through forensic on-chain analysis, not announcement.
The DAO's response: "This is extraction. The brand, the audits, the growth—we funded all of it. Why should Labs privatize the returns?" They proposed seizing Labs' IP and equity.
Labs' response: "Where were you when this was being born? When we were burning cash, fighting regulators, surviving hacks? You showed up after the bleeding was done, and now you want to own what we built?" They rejected the DAO's authority.
Who is right?
Both sides.
And that is the architectural problem. When both sides are right, the issue is not morality. It is structure.
The Founder's Rage Is Correct Labs is right that:
Founders absorbed existential risk. The protocol exists because someone took the fall when failure was likely.
Committees do not ship competitive software. Aave's dominance comes from Labs' ability to iterate, respond, and execute without bureaucratic drag.
Once operational control shifts to governance, the historical pattern is clear: Sushi, Maker, and others show the cost of losing builder autonomy. Governance friction leads to stagnation.
The DAO's Panic Is Also Correct
The DAO is right that:
They funded Aave's infrastructure. The treasury built the brand, audits, liquidity, legal defense.
Information asymmetry is a governance catastrophe. If Labs can unilaterally redirect $10M without transparency or consent, token holders have no leverage and no warning.
Without explicit boundaries, extraction is inevitable. Labs has no formal obligation to share value. Nothing prevents this from happening again—or escalating.
The Structural Truth
This conflict is not the result of bad intentions on either side. It is the inevitable result of relying on implicit tension instead of explicit structure.
As long as Aave was small and founder charisma held the system together, this worked. But as the protocol scaled, as the treasury grew to billions, as secondary actors joined governance, the implicit agreement became increasingly fragile. A single business decision exposed it completely.
This is a predictable failure mode. It will repeat in every organization built on implicit tension, regardless of how well-intentioned the actors are.
To understand the fix, we must first understand how structures actually maintain their shape under stress.
Tensegrity is an architectural principle discovered by Buckminster Fuller and Kenneth Snelson. It describes structures that maintain integrity through continuous tension balanced against discontinuous compression.
Most buildings rely on rigid supports crushing inward: massive pillars, heavy beams. They are stable when undisturbed but brittle when stressed. Remove one pillar, and the structure collapses.
A tensegrity structure works differently. It floats. Cables pull outward in continuous tension; struts push inward in discontinuous compression. The opposing forces create stability. The structure is most stable when these forces are in dynamic equilibrium.
A tensegrity dome doesn't rest on pillars. It hovers—held up by the very forces pushing and pulling against each other.
Aave was always a tensegrity structure. But it was an implicit one—its forces were unspoken and invisible.
The struts are the distinct entities that push outward, creating space. In Aave:
Strut 1: Aave Labs (The Execution Engine)
Operates through speed, autonomy, unilateral decision-making.
Must have the freedom to hire, fire, experiment, and monetize.
Its structural integrity depends on being separate from the DAO.
This is not greed; it is a functional requirement of execution.
Strut 2: The Aave DAO (The Sovereignty Engine)
Operates through transparency, deliberation, and collective consent.
Must have authority over protocol parameters, treasury, and brand.
Its structural integrity depends on being distinct from Labs.
This is not entitlement; it is a functional requirement of legitimacy.
The struts are not enemies. They are load-bearing opposites. The structure requires their separation. The moment you try to merge them ("Let's just have everyone vote on everything" or "Let Labs decide everything"), the structure loses its shape.
The cables are the forces that hold the struts together. In Aave, there were three critical cables:
Cable 1: The Social Contract An unwritten agreement that Labs would prioritize the DAO's interests and the DAO would grant Labs operational freedom. This was a handshake—dependent entirely on goodwill.
Cable 2: The Shared Narrative Stani's founding vision and the story of Aave as a public good. This narrative temporarily unified both struts toward a common purpose.
Cable 3: Economic Alignment The shared financial interest in the success of the $AAVE token. Both Labs and the DAO benefit when the protocol grows.
Why The Snap The fee-switch decision was not the cause of the conflict. It was the stress test that revealed the primary cable—the Social Contract—was fragile and unwritten.
When Labs redirected fees without transparency or consent, the DAO felt extraction. When the DAO responded with seizure proposals, Labs felt betrayal. Both interpretations were true. In that moment, the implicit tension became contested tension, and the structure snapped.
The solution is not to eliminate the tension. It is to make the tension visible, structural, and resilient.
We move from Implicit Tensegrity (held together by hope and charisma) to Explicit Tensegrity (held together by code, constitutions, and councils).
The Problem: The financial relationship is a handshake. It relies on goodwill.
The Solution: Programmatic Fee Splitter Deploy an immutable smart contract that automatically splits revenue between the DAO and Labs (e.g., 60/40) at the protocol level.
How This Works:
Every time the protocol generates fees (swaps, lending interest, etc.), the splitter automatically distributes them.
The split is visible on-chain. No one needs to ask; no one can hide.
Labs knows with certainty what its share is. The DAO knows with certainty what it controls.
The "cable" transforms from trust (soft, breakable) into code (hard, immutable).
Why This Matters Structurally: This is not about dividing money. It is about removing the daily negotiation that wears down the system. It acknowledges a deep truth: Labs needs profit to function, and the DAO needs revenue to govern. Rather than pretend this is not true, we engineer it into the structure.
The cable no longer depends on anyone being generous. It depends on mathematics.
The Problem: The operational domains of Labs and the DAO overlap and are undefined. Nobody knows where one's authority ends and the other begins.
The Solution: The Aave Constitution Draft and ratify a formal governance document (on-chain) that explicitly defines:
Labs' Sovereign Domain (Protected from DAO micromanagement):
Product roadmap and feature prioritization
Engineering architecture and technical decisions
Hiring, firing, and organizational structure
User experience optimization
Application layer monetization (within the fee-splitter limits)
DAO's Sovereign Domain (Protected from Labs unilateral action):
Protocol-level risk parameters (loan-to-value ratios, interest rates)
Treasury allocation and budget approval
IP licensing and brand partnerships
Major protocol upgrades
Governance rules themselves
Shared Decision Domains (Requiring negotiation):
Strategic pivots that affect both execution and protocol
Major revenue model changes beyond the fee-splitter
Regulatory responses
How This Works:
Labs has a "Safe Harbor." It can execute freely within its domain, knowing the DAO cannot seize it.
The DAO has "Check and Balance." It has authority over protocol governance, knowing Labs cannot unilaterally extract value.
Conflicts can now be mediated within the constitutional framework rather than escalating to existential questions like "Who owns Aave?"
Why This Matters Structurally: In tensegrity, struts must not collide. If they touch, the structure loses its shape. The Constitution prevents collision by giving each strut its own territory. It removes ambiguity. When ambiguity exists, people fight over it. When boundaries are clear, people can disagree about implementation without questioning legitimacy.
The Problem: The only existing escalation path is nuclear. When disagreement happens, it goes straight to community-wide governance votes. There is no mechanism to absorb high-stakes conflict before it becomes system-wide.
The Solution: The Constitutional Council Establish a specialized body whose role is to:
Interpret the Aave Constitution when ambiguities arise
Mediate disputes between Labs and the DAO before proposals go to community vote
Have the power to force renegotiation (not to overrule either side, but to require dialogue)
Represent both Labs and the DAO (not neutral, but balanced)
How This Works:
If Labs makes a decision that feels like extraction, the DAO can escalate to the Council (not directly to a vote).
If the DAO proposes something that handicaps Labs' execution, Labs can escalate to the Council.
The Council forces negotiation. It says, "You both have valid points. Here is what the Constitution actually says. Now work it out."
If negotiation fails, then the proposal goes to a community vote—but now the community votes with full context, not in a panic.
Why This Matters Structurally: In tensegrity structures, joints must be flexible. They absorb shock so the whole skeleton doesn't shatter. A Constitutional Council is the cartilage of the organization. It allows Aave to deform under load (to accommodate disagreement) and then return to shape (to rebalance). Without shock absorbers, any stress becomes catastrophic.
The Problem: Asymmetry of information creates paranoia. The DAO discovered the fee-switch through forensic analysis, not announcement. This signals: "We are hiding something."
The Solution: Real-Time Treasury Dashboards & 72-Hour Pre-Notice
Deploy a real-time dashboard showing all fee flows, treasury movements, and Labs' revenue streams.
Require Labs to announce any revenue-impacting decision 72 hours before implementation, allowing time for DAO objection or appeal to the Council.
How This Works:
There are no more "discovered" fee switches. Everything is announced and visible.
The DAO has time to object before implementation, preventing the sense of extraction.
Transparency removes the emotional heat of the system. Paranoia is high-energy; visibility is low-energy.
Why This Matters Structurally: In a tensegrity structure, all forces must be visible to be balanced. A hidden force creates an imbalance that propagates through the entire structure, eventually causing collapse. Automation (dashboards, pre-notice) is the cheapest way to make all forces visible at all times.
These four fixes have a shared principle: Prevolution.
Prevolution means "Pre-Evolution"—designing a system to evolve before crisis forces it.
Most organizations oscillate between two bad modes:
Revolution: Destroy the old system and start over. Fast, chaotic, usually creates new problems.
Devolution: Keep the old system but squeeze more from it. Slow, exhausting, usually makes power asymmetries worse.
Prevolution is different. It says: "We will upgrade the structure intentionally before it breaks. We will design the system to change shape under load, not to snap."
The four fixes are Prevolutionary because they:
Acknowledge tension as structural. They do not try to eliminate the Labs-DAO conflict. They formalize it.
Make evolution expected. The Constitution can be amended. The fee-splitter ratio can change. The Council's interpretation can evolve. The system is designed to grow without collapsing.
Metabolize disagreement. Instead of disagreement leading to civil war, it leads to Constitutional renegotiation. The system digests the conflict and emerges stronger.
This is how biological systems stay alive. They do not avoid stress; they are built to process stress and grow from it.
Most organizations confuse Stability (resistance to change) with Integrity (coherence under change).
A stone is stable. It does not move. But drop it in an earthquake, and it shatters.
A gymnast is in constant motion. Their limbs bend, twist, and rebalance continuously. But they can land a flip on a balance beam without falling.
The gymnast has integrity through motion. The stone has brittle stability.
Organizations usually try to be stones: fixed hierarchies, frozen roles, locked-in processes. They think stability means "no change." But in reality, rigidity creates brittleness.
Aave, using these four Prevolutionary fixes, would be an organization with integrity through motion:
The fee-splitter allows Labs to pursue profitability and the DAO to maintain revenue. Both adjust their needs continuously. The cable stays taut without breaking.
The Constitution gives both struts their space. They push against each other constantly, but they push within defined domains. The structure holds its shape.
The Council absorbs the shocks of disagreement. Conflicts don't shatter the system; they trigger rebalancing.
The transparency keeps all forces visible so imbalances can be corrected before they cascade.
The result is an organization that is stable in motion—not because it resists change, but because it is engineered to accommodate, process, and metabolize change.
If you are involved in any organization (DAO, protocol, company, nonprofit), ask yourself:
Paradox Questions (Are you naming the real tension?):
What opposing forces define your organization?
Are people trying to eliminate one of these forces, or to balance them?
What happens when you state the paradox explicitly? Do people get uncomfortable? (That discomfort is the sign you found the real problem.)
Tensegrity Questions (Are your structures visible?):
What "cables" (agreements, trust, narratives) hold your organization together?
Are these cables written down and visible, or do they exist only as "understood"?
What would happen if a key person left? Would the structure collapse?
Prevolution Questions (Are you designing for evolution?):
Where are you relying on implicit agreements instead of explicit structures?
Where is information asymmetry hidden in technical complexity?
Where are opposing forces in tension without being formalized?
Those are the places where your system is fragile. Those are the places where you are one controversial decision away from a crisis.
The good news: You can engineer your way out of that fragility. Not by eliminating the tension (tension is structural), but by making it explicit, legible, and generative.
The Aave crisis is not an ending. It is an invitation.
If the DAO and Labs can convert this conflict into a structural redesign—a programmatic fee-splitter, a Constitution, a Mediation Council, and automated transparency—they will have built the prototype for how decentralized organizations can operate without oscillating between extraction and revolution.
They will have demonstrated a new organizational form: the Deliberately Developmental Organization—one that does not fear the tension of opposing truths, but builds its very architecture upon them.
This is the path to Metamodern governance: organizations that are not just decentralized, but truly anti-fragile. Organizations that metabolize conflict into growth. Organizations that prove integrity is not the absence of tension, but the excellence of engineering.
The crisis has broken the structure. Now it is time to rebuild it better—using the principles of tensegrity, the discipline of Prevolution, and the recognition that the strongest organizations are not those that avoid paradox, but those that build themselves out of paradox.
This framework is part of the Prevolution Series, exploring how Web3 systems (and all complex organizations) can evolve beyond the extraction-backlash-disruption cycle through structural design and tensegrity engineering.
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
No comments yet