ACI questions Aave Labs funding, fees ahead of $51M vote

Aave Chan Initiative founder Marc Zeller published an “audit” of Aave Labs ahead of a Snapshot vote on a $51 million funding proposal called “Aave Will Win.” The report alleges Aave Labs has received about $86 million to date and that roughly $5.5 million in partner-fee revenue from the aave.com interface was routed without a DAO vote.

The document was posted on Aave’s governance forum and shared on X. Zeller presented it as an accountability review using the same template ACI applied to itself: what was delivered, what it cost, and what the return was. The post asserts Aave Labs has not provided a cost-per-outcome report, financial disclosures, or wallet transparency, and asks tokenholders to review those points before voting.

A central claim concerns swap-fee flows from the aave.com front end. The report states that partner-fee revenue that had previously gone to the DAO via a ParaSwap referral changed when Aave Labs updated integrations, sending 15 to 25 basis points of swap fees to a Labs-controlled address without a governance vote. The post cites a TokenLogic dashboard and onchain transfers, estimating around $5.5 million across mainnet and Layer 2 networks, including 933 ETH distributed on mainnet.

The audit uses Horizon, Aave’s real-world-asset market, as a case study. Based on onchain data, it places Horizon’s total supply at about $153 million, with roughly 22% in stablecoins and 25.5% in RWA collateral concentrated in a single asset, USCC. The post highlights concentration in user activity, including a large RLUSD depositor with no borrows and a DirectMinter address linked to idle GHO, and argues the active lending base is smaller than headline totals imply.

On economics, the filing states Horizon’s collector shows limited cumulative revenue to the DAO, while incentives and related costs run in the millions. It points to reported Merkl incentives since launch and the cost of supporting GHO’s savings rate, estimating a profile of roughly $24 spent per $1 earned.

Beyond Horizon, the document credits Aave Labs with delivering V2 and the initial V3 codebase, but contends that later upgrades and much day-to-day work tied to revenue growth came from external DAO service providers. It argues the new $51 million request, which includes funding for proposed products and an accelerated path to Aave V4, lacks the accountability and wallet transparency ACI is seeking.

The governance thread revisits earlier conflicts over voting power. ACI references a failed attempt to adopt conflict-of-interest and disclosure rules and claims onchain analysis linked most “NAY” votes to a cluster associated with the founding infrastructure. It also notes the Horizon proposal passed with heavy support from a single delegation representing 57% of the “FOR” voting power.

ACI further warns that transferring 75,000 AAVE under “Aave Will Win” would convey treasury value and voting weight to an entity whose broader AAVE holdings have not been publicly disclosed. The report links its fee-routing criticism to Aave Labs’ stated commitment under the proposal to return “100% of Aave Labs’ product revenue” to the DAO, which it characterizes as reversing a disputed change in fee flows.

Aave Labs did not publish a point-by-point response in the materials cited by ACI. The Snapshot vote will determine whether to fund the $51 million package while the DAO reviews the claims on historical funding, fee distribution, and governance concentration