Aave Ends Months‑Long Revenue Battle With Vote Sending All Protocol Earnings to AAVE Holders - Crypto Economy

TL;DR:

• Aave approved the “Aave Will Win” proposal, which redirects 100% of revenues from all its branded products to the protocol’s DAO.
• The vote ended the dispute that began in December 2025, when the Labs division silently diverted swap fees away from the community treasury.
• The protocol generated $140 million in revenue during 2025 and aims to scale from $40 billion in TVL to $1 trillion.

The “Aave Will Win” (AWW) proposal was approved, considered by protocol founder Stani Kulechov as “the most important proposal in history.” The outcome establishes a framework that redirects 100% of the revenue generated by all branded products to the DAO, unifying the protocol’s economic rights under the network’s native token.

The approval put an end to a key dispute within the protocol. Community delegates had warned that the integration of the CoWSwap trading aggregator into the Aave interface had silently diverted swap fees away from the community treasury. That controversy exposed an underlying tension over who controlled the protocol’s most valuable asset: its user-facing products and the revenue they generate.


Aave’s New Economic Framework

The proposal approved on Sunday also authorized an allocation of $25 million in stablecoins and 5,000 AAVE tokens —equivalent to approximately $6.8 million— earmarked to fund the Labs division’s activities. Under the new framework, the DAO takes on the responsibility of funding this division, reversing the previous logic.

Protocol revenues reached $140 million in 2025 and are projected to reach similar figures in 2026. On top of that come application-layer revenues from Pro, App, Horizon, and Kit. Swap operations on the network already generate between $10 and $20 million in additional income on top of existing protocol fees.


Alliances That Harm Holders Will Not Be Tolerated

“If you hold AAVE, you don’t just hold the economic rights of the protocol, but also the brand, the users, and the integrations,” Kulechov wrote. The proposal takes a firm stance against what he called “value leakage,” the exact problem that triggered the December dispute. Service providers will be required to work exclusively for the protocol, and relationships that harm holders will not be tolerated.

Meanwhile, Aave V4 introduces a feature that converts idle capital in lending pools into yield-generating positions, a revenue stream that did not exist in V3. Additionally, an investment in agentic artificial intelligence infrastructure is planned for developers building on top of the protocol.

The network concentrates approximately $25 billion in total value locked across multiple chains, positioning it as the largest lending protocol in DeFi. Kulechov set a target of scaling to $1 trillion, defining the protocol not as a bank, but as “a financial network that any fintech, bank, or asset manager can plug into.”