The Aave Will Win framework has cleared its last governance hurdle. Cointelegraph reported on April 13 that the Aave DAO approved a $25 million stablecoin grant and 75,000 AAVE to Aave Labs in a binding on-chain vote, passing with roughly 75% support. The vote makes the framework enforceable at the smart contract level, completing a three-stage governance process that began with a contentious 52.58% Temp Check in early March.
52% to 75%, Through Three Votes
The path from initial proposal to binding execution took six weeks and three separate votes, each with a different margin.
The Temp Check in early March passed at 52.58%, or 622,300 votes in favor against 497,100 opposed. It was the closest major governance vote in Aave's history. Marc Zeller's Aave Chan Initiative challenged the result and later exited the protocol entirely. BGD Labs, a core engineering contributor, had already departed in February.
The ARFC (Aave Request for Final Comment) Snapshot vote on April 12 was described by founder Stani Kulechov as a "landslide," though exact percentages were not disclosed at the time. The revised proposal had incorporated community feedback: IP transfer requirements before funding disbursement, protocol-level fee routing guarantees, and clearer accountability mechanisms.
The binding on-chain AIP vote, which concluded on April 13, locked in 75% support. That margin is decisive but not unanimous. One in four participating token holders voted against sending $25 million in stablecoins and 75,000 AAVE tokens to the protocol's development lab. For a framework Kulechov called "the most important proposal in Aave's history," the opposition remained substantial.
What the Binding Vote Actually Enforces
Until this vote, the Aave Will Win framework existed only as governance intent. Snapshot votes are off-chain and carry no smart contract weight. The AIP changes that.
The approved funding breaks down into:
- $25 million in stablecoins: $5 million upfront, $20 million streamed over one year
- 75,000 AAVE tokens: vesting linearly over two years
- Up to $17.5 million in additional growth grants: tied to specific product milestones for Aave Pro, Aave Card, Aave Horizon (the RWA market), and the Aave mobile app
In exchange, Aave Labs will route 100% of gross revenue from all Aave-branded products back to the DAO treasury. That covers the aave.com swap interface, institutional products, enterprise deployments, and the real-world asset market. The arrangement resembles a government contractor model: Labs builds, the DAO owns the revenue, and funding flows through governance-approved budgets.
A dedicated foundation will hold Aave's trademarks, domains, and brand assets, solving the structural problem that decentralized organizations cannot own intellectual property directly.
The Electorate Changed Between Votes
The margin expansion from 52% to 75% did not happen purely through persuasion. Between the Temp Check and the final vote, two of Aave's most influential governance participants exited.
The Aave Chan Initiative, which had coordinated governance delegation for years, published an audit of Aave Labs questioning whether addresses linked to the team had tipped the Temp Check outcome. After the audit, ACI withdrew from governance. BGD Labs, which handled core protocol engineering, departed separately.
Both exits removed opposition votes and their associated delegated AAVE tokens from the governance pool. The community has debated whether the final 75% reflects broader consensus or a smaller electorate. The counterargument is that ACI and BGD Labs represented concentrated dissent, and their departure simply made the underlying support more visible.
Either way, the binding vote is final. Smart contract execution does not distinguish between a 75% margin from 10,000 voters and a 75% margin from 1,000.
Where This Puts Aave in DeFi Governance
Aave manages over $27 billion in total value locked, more than any other lending protocol. The framework makes it one of the first major DeFi protocols to formally separate its development lab from protocol revenue at the smart contract level.
The model creates a precedent. Protocols like Uniswap, Compound, and MakerDAO have all wrestled with variations of the same question: who captures the value that protocol users generate? Aave's answer is now encoded on-chain. The DAO gets everything. Aave Labs earns a fixed budget, not a revenue share.
For Aave V4, which launched on Ethereum on March 30 after its own contentious 60-40 governance vote, the framework locks in long-term funding for the hub-and-spoke architecture that isolates risk across separate markets while sharing a common liquidity pool.
The framework also formally ratifies V4 as Aave's permanent technical foundation. With the economic model and the technical roadmap both approved on-chain, the governance battles that dominated the first quarter of 2026 appear to be settling. Whether the losing 25% re-engage, fork, or simply hold their tokens in silence is the remaining open question.
Overview
The Aave DAO passed the binding on-chain AIP vote for the Aave Will Win framework on April 13 with roughly 75% support, according to Cointelegraph. The vote makes $25 million in stablecoins and 75,000 AAVE tokens to Aave Labs enforceable at the smart contract level. In exchange, 100% of Aave Labs product revenue flows to the DAO treasury. The margin widened from 52.58% at the March Temp Check through an ARFC "landslide" to the final 75%, a trajectory influenced in part by the departure of two major governance participants between votes. Aave becomes one of the first major DeFi protocols to formally encode a development lab funding model on-chain.
Recommended Reading
- Aave Will Win Passes Its Second Governance Vote, and This Time It Was Not Close
- 86 Crypto Projects Shut Down in Q1 as Capital Migrates to ETFs and Stablecoins
- Ethereum Stablecoin Supply Hits 180 Billion Dollars, a Record, With 60% Market Share
