The governance battle that started when Aave Labs removed swap fees from the DAO treasury in December is over and the community has voted in favor of the former.
Aave’s board adopted the “Aave Will Win” (AWW) proposal, which founder Stani Kulechov on Sunday called “the most important proposal in Aave’s history,” approving a framework that returns 100% of revenues from all Aave-branded products to the DAO and consolidates economic rights under a single asset: the $AAVE sign.
This shift means that the DAO is now responsible for funding Aave Labs’ operations. And the proposal passed Sunday approved a stablecoin grant of $25 million and 5,000 $AAVE token allocation (approximately $6.8 million) to Aave Labs.
Aave DAO, or Decentralized Autonomous Organization, is a governance system that manages the Aave Lending Protocol, allowing token holders to vote on decisions such as upgrades, fees, and treasury usage. It essentially acts as the community-managed decision-making body for the protocol.
Aave Will Win, the most important proposal in Aave history, has just been passed by a landslide.
Here is the master plan for the future:
General management
– Aave becomes completely token-centric: one asset, one model: $AAVE
– To date, protocol revenues per AIP-1 have reached the Aave…
— Stani (@StaniKulechov) April 12, 2026
The vote resolves a dispute that CoinDesk reported in December, when representatives indicated that the integration of trading aggregator CoWSwap into Aave’s interface had quietly shifted swap-related fees from the community treasury to a third-party recipient.
That controversy revealed a deeper tension over whether Aave Labs or the DAO had control over the protocol’s most valuable asset: its user-facing products and the revenue they generate.
The so-called ‘Aave Will Win’ (AWW) proposal answers that question decisively in favor of token holders. Protocol revenues, which reached $140 million in 2025 and will reach this level in 2026, are now supplemented by application layer revenues from Aave Pro, Aave App, Horizon and Aave Kit. Swaps on Aave.com and Aave Pro already generate $10 to $20 million in additional revenue on top of existing protocol fees.
‘If you own it $AAVE“You own not only the economic rights of the protocol, but also the brand, the users and the integrations,” Kulechov wrote. Aave Labs commits to working exclusively on Aave-related products under the new structure.
The application layer is where the ambition lies. The Aave App will target regular users with what Kulechov described as a “fintech-like experience” with $1 million per user account protection and a card to be launched later that generates fees for the treasury.
The proposal takes a hard line against what Kulechov called “value leakage,” the very issue that sparked the December dispute. Service providers must build exclusively for Aave, with zero tolerance for establishing relationships or products built for themselves at the expense of token holders.
“The payments for posting board proposals are over,” he wrote.
Each service provider will have measurable goals, and improvements to the governance process are planned to reduce what Kulechov described as politics and friction.
On the technical side, Aave V4’s reinvestment feature turns idle float capital in credit pools into return-generating positions, creating an additional income stream that didn’t exist in V3.
New ‘Spokes’ expand collateral options and address the demand side of DeFi liquidity. The team also plans to invest in agentic AI infrastructure for developers building on Aave.
Aave has a total value of approximately $25 billion across multiple chains, making it the largest credit protocol in DeFi. Its $140 million annual revenue figure places it alongside Uniswap and Lido as one of the few protocols generating nine-figure incomes.
Kulechov’s stated goal is to scale from $40 billion to $1 trillion, positioning Aave not as a bank, but as “a financial network that any fintech, bank or asset manager can connect to.”