Aave DAO clashes with founder over website revenue

All hell broke loose in the Aave world last week.

Founder Stani Kulechov went toe-to-toe with, well, everybody else who cares about the protocol after his company was accused of attempting to “privatise” revenue that had previously gone to the Aave DAO.

In the DAO’s forum, public opinion was united against Kulechov and his company, Aave Labs. But the most notable opposition came from two people: Marc Zeller, founder of the Aave Chan Initiative, and the pseudonymous Ezr3al, the DAO’s largest delegate.

The fight was a stunning display of disunity between players who should be fully aligned.

On the one hand, the person and company that built the protocol, and on the other, the de facto leaders of the community that have been given control of the protocol.

The fight was also a showcase for the tensions that can arise in crypto developers’ tortured attempts to decentralise — to turn their protocols from privately-owned businesses into publicly-owned ones.

It all started on December 11, when Ezr3al published a post in the DAO forum scrutinising a recent announcement from Aave Labs.

The company had said it had partnered with CoWSwap to provide “an improved swap experience” on its interface. That’s the website that provides non-technical investors an easy-to-use method of accessing the Aave protocol.

The problem? The interface already featured revenue-generating swap technology. Moreover, that preexisting revenue stream had gone to the DAO. CoWSwap-generated revenue, meanwhile, was going to Aave Labs.

To make matters worse, revenue from the old swap provider, Velora — formerly known as Paraswap — was about $1.1 million in 2025. But revenue generated by the CoWSwap replacement has been far higher — at least $10 million annualised — according to Ezr3al.

The delegate said this was an unacceptable attempt to profit off the Aave brand, which underwent a DAO-funded visual overhaul this year.

Aave Labs rushed to defend itself in the forum. The company might not own or control the Aave protocol — AAVE tokenholders control the DAO, and the DAO controls the protocol — but it does own and control the interface, it said.

That interface costs money, and collecting a fee on swaps, a feature that doesn’t exist at the protocol level, is an eminently reasonable way to defray those costs, the company said, adding the DAO was “free to create a DAO-run interface if that direction is ever desired.”

Then Zeller entered the fray. He took his usual bare-knuckles approach.

Zeller said Aave Labs and every other “service provider” hired by the DAO had a fiduciary duty to the cooperative. He also suggested there was a “tacit” agreement between the two: the DAO allows Aave Labs to use the Aave brand in return for directing interface revenue to the DAO.

“It seems we have been fooled in considering this a natural alignment, and we acknowledge the new reality,” he wrote.

Kulechov said the original revenue stream had only been donated to the DAO due to “regulatory uncertainty,” rather than any sort of obligation or duty. As for the idea that Labs owed the DAO a fiduciary duty, that was “nonsense,” he said.

The battle has inspired at least three proposals in the Aave DAO forum. One would have the DAO purchase a competitor, Spark.

Another, the “poison pill,” would have the DAO sue Aave Labs for “full ownership of all code, intellectual property, and brand,” 100% of Labs’ equity, and all past revenue the company generated from Aave-branded products.

A third would simply have the DAO request control of Aave brand assets, such as social media accounts.

The first two aren’t likely to go anywhere. But all three speak to the overall furore the incident has caused. The DAO is looking for solutions, and one person does expect to find answers.

“When you own $AAVE, what do you actually own?” Zeller wrote on X. “The next few weeks will bring definitive clarity to this strategic question.”

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