A governance vote at the decentralised finance (DeFi) lending protocol Aave upset a lot of important people since a proposal to decide who owns Aave’s brand assets was moved to a Snapshot vote without anybody agreeing on it. Critics say that the decision to speed up the vote on who owns the brand demonstrated problems with how one of DeFi’s biggest DAOs runs its governance.
The proposal asks the community if AAVE $157.58 token holders should be able to obtain back ownership of the protocol’s brand assets, like domains, social media handles, naming rights, and other intellectual property, through a DAO-run legal organisation.
Stani Kulechov, who started Aave, said that the community wanted to vote on the matter. Community is very interested in moving forward and is ready to make a choice.
Kulechov said it was time for tokenholders to vote, but several members in the community said that the vote came too soon, which was against the norms of governance.
Community leaders accuse Aave labs of unilateral escalation
Ernesto Boado, who used to be Aave Lab’s chief technical officer and prepared the proposal, said the vote was brought up without his knowledge or authorisation.
Boado said of X, “This is not my proposal in spirit.” He stated he wouldn’t have allowed it go to a vote if people in the community were still talking about it. He said that the escalation goes against the community’s trust code. Marc Zeller, who runs the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), said that the plan was “unilaterally escalated,” even though delegates and token holders still had questions.
The choices made about scheduling and procedures made it much less likely that people in the area would take part. He also observed that individuals who received the information late were facing difficulties in convincing others to transfer or re-delegate.
What started as a push for more clarity and a fairer relationship between token holders and the current stewards is now becoming a hostile takeover attempt by Labs. Moving the vote to the holidays was a bad idea since important stakeholders, investors, and institutions have said before that it is one of the “worst windows” for high-stakes governance votes. In response to the criticism that the discourse has been going on for five days and that there have been a lot of comments.
The theory primarily concerns “soft” asset ownership. The opposition shows how much power you can have if you manage when things happen, how they get worse, and how knowledge spreads.