Aave’s infamous “Aave Will Win” funding proposal just cleared its first major governance hurdle today, March 1, 2026, after obtaining a slim 52.58% approval, but ACI founder Marc Zeller wasted no time challenging the legitimacy of the vote, claiming that addresses linked to Aave Labs determined the outcome.
The off-chain snapshot vote closed on Sunday with 622,300 votes in favor, 497,100 votes against, and 64,200 “abstains”. The result moves Aave Labs’ request for up to $42.5 million in stablecoins and 75,000 AAVE tokens to the protocol’s Aave Request for Final Comment (ARFC) stage, where the terms can be revised before the permanent on-chain vote.
However, Zeller’s comments alleged that approximately 233,000 tokens from three clusters linked to Aave Labs, including a 111,000 token delegation from co-founder Stani Kulechov, which swayed the outcome.
From Zeller’s calculations, removing those votes would change the result to 387,000 votes in favor and 497,100 votes against.
Vote exposes deep governance drift
The narrow margins from the published vote reflect months of increasing tensions between Aave Chain Initiative and Aave Labs over protocol control, funding transparency, and the future direction of one of DeFi’s biggest lending platforms.
In the proposal, tokenholders were asked to approve funding in exchange for Aave Labs redirecting all of its product revenue to the DAO treasury. This includes fees from aave.com swaps, its upcoming mobile app, Aave Card, Aave Pro, Aave Kit for enterprises, and Aave Horizon RWA market.
In exchange, Aave Labs requested funding to cover operations it was previously covering through product revenue.
According to the proposal, “by directing 100% of revenue to the DAO, Aave Labs will not be able to self-fund going forward. Without the ability to earn or raise revenue, there is no way to cover the costs across product development, business development, and other operational functions.”
Shortly after the vote, Kulechov himself posted on his X account saying, “Temp Check for the Aave Will Win proposal has passed. This brings Aave Labs closer to a fully token-centric model, directing 100% of product revenue to the $AAVE token.”
Governance power concerns increasing
Zeller’s post-vote analysis identified some concerns about Aave Labs acquiring additional governance weight through the 75,000 AAVE tokens. An Aave user also commented in the forum that “The risk of ACI consortium to milk the AAVE DAO treasury is higher as they do not have much AAVE tokens but control the daily ops (operations).”
The vote came just after Zeller published an audit on February 25, where he questioned the ROI for around $86 million that Aave Labs received in previous funding rounds ($16.2 million from the 2017 ICO, $32.5 million from venture rounds, $31.93 million in direct DAO payments, and around $5.5 million from “unapproved” swap fees from aave.com).
The audit used ROI analysis to assess Aave Labs’ historical funding. It credited Aave Labs with building V1, V2, and the initial V3.0 codebase, but argued that most of the following revenue growth came from upgrades by the DAO service providers.
Zeller claimed that the V3.0 revenue amounted to $3.33 million, significantly less than the $179 million generated after service provider upgrades.
Aave Labs then published its own report the same day, reiterating successful innovations like the liquidity pool model, Flash Loans, the Safety Module, and V3’s Efficiency Mode, which were all developed before the DAO started using a service-provider structure.
BGD Labs leaves the Aave scene
On February 20, BGD Labs announced that it would not renew its engagement with the AaveDAO after April 1, effectively ending a four-year tenure as the project’s main technical contributor. The firm was instrumental in building and maintaining Aave’s V3.
In their departure announcement, BGD Labs mentioned centralization concerns with Aave Labs and an asymmetric organizational scenario as their main reasons for leaving. BGD Labs also criticized what it described as an aggressive promotion of V4 by highlighting “unfounded” shortcomings of V3, despite its market dominance and secure track record.
The framework also proposes creating a Foundation to hold Aave trademarks and intellectual property on behalf of the DAO, which addresses concerns about Aave Labs’ exclusive legal ownership of the brand. However, details on the structure, governance, and trademark transfer would follow in a separate proposal.