Aave Team Raises Concerns Over Previous Performance: Received $86 Million in Funding, Holds 23% of Tokens, All Six Products Have Failed or Lost Money

BlockBeats News, February 25th, Aave ecosystem contributor ACI founder Marc Zeller released a public report, disclosing that Aave Labs has received approximately $86 million in cumulative capital support since 2017, including ICO, VC funding, and DAO direct grants. The founding team reserved 23% of the LEND tokens during the 2017 ICO (later migrated to AAVE at a 100:1 ratio). The report noted that Labs had around $48.7 million in capital before receiving DAO funding, and has since received around $37.4 million in grants from the DAO, currently seeking an additional $51 million through the "Aave Will Win" proposal.

The report critically questioned Labs' past product performance, stating that six independent products launched in addition to the core protocol have all failed or not achieved profitability. The RWA project Horizon, while once claiming to have surpassed a $1 billion scale, actually has an RWA collateral size of approximately $135 million, highly concentrated in a single asset. Since its launch in August 2025, Horizon has brought in approximately $216,000 in cumulative revenue for the DAO, but incentive and related costs amount to around $5.25 million, with an input-output ratio of about 24:1.

The report also pointed out that early core development members of Aave V1, V2, and V3.0 had left Labs between 2021 and 2022, with V3.0 being seen as the last major protocol version led by Labs, subsequent versions primarily driven by DAO service providers. In relevant governance votes, a single large delegation address played a key role in the approval of the Horizon proposal, sparking community discussions on governance centralization and fund utilization efficiency.

The above controversy comes at the time of the deliberation on a new $17.5 million product growth grant proposal, with the Aave community's discussions on fund allocation, performance disclosure, and governance transparency heating up further.