Aave Chan Initiative to Wind Down as Governance Crisis Deepens Over $51M V4 Proposal

The Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), Aave Protocol's core governance team, said on March 3 it will wind down operations and exit, following BGD Labs' February 20 decision to step away from maintaining the Aave V3 codebase, and the AAVE token price fell more than 11% after the announcement, BitpushNews reports. The departures stem from controversy over Aave Labs' "Aave Will Win" proposal, which bundles roughly $51 million in V4 development funding, transfers all future Aave-branded product revenues to the DAO, and plans to make V4 the sole technical foundation while phasing out V3, as well as alleged self-voting by addresses linked to Aave Labs in an interim vote that passed with 52.58% support. ACI argues this structure and opaque voting undermine independent service providers, despite pushing for stricter onchain milestone tracking and limits on budget recipients' self-voting, and BitpushNews notes the conflict exposes broader DAO governance challenges including concentrated voting power and the difficulty of replacing teams such as ACI, which helped expand the GHO stablecoin from $35 million to $527 million. Kulechov has referenced potential "structural improvements" like unbundling proposals and clarifying voting boundaries in the ARFC phase of the revision, but if consensus fails, an extreme outcome could see BGD and ACI fork a new protocol, leaving Aave to confront an immediate gap in core contributors and longer-term questions over balancing founder vision, developer interests, and community governance, BitpushNews reports.