Compass Investments

the initiative “Aave Will Win ” passed the tempo test with 52.58% support.

Mark Zeller, founder of ACI, expresses doubts about the integrity of the voting process.

This motion asks the DAO to approve V4 as Aave’s core technical platform.

Aave’s famous “Aave Will Win” endowment initiative just passed its first major hurdle in the governance process today, March 1, 2026, with a 52.58% approval rate, but ACI CEO Mark Zoeller immediately challenged the validity of the vote, claiming that the vote count was tilted in favor of Aave Labs affiliated addresses.

The off-chain voting ended on Sunday with 622,300 votes in favor, 497,100 votes against, and 64,200 abstentions. As a result, Aave Labs’ request for up to $42.5 million in Stablecoins and 75,000 AAVE tokens moved to the Aave Request for Final Comment (ARFC) stage, where the terms can be adjusted before the final vote on the network.

However, Zeller’s statements include claims that approximately 233,000 tokens from three groups affiliated with Aave Labs, including a delegation of 111,000 tokens from co-founder Stani Kulechev, influenced the outcome of the vote.

According to Zeller’s calculations, if those votes were excluded, the ratio would have changed to 387,000 votes in favor, with 497,100 votes against.

The narrow margin in the result reflects the tension that has built up in recent months between the Aave Chain Initiative and Aave Labs over protocol control, funding transparency and the future direction of one of DeFi’s largest lending systems.

The proposal itself stipulated that token holders would approve the allocation of funds in exchange for Aave Labs’ commitment to funnel all profits from its products into the DAO’s coffers. This includes revenue from exchanges on aave.com, the anticipated mobile app, Aave Card, Aave Pro, Aave Kit for Business and the Aave Horizon RWA marketplace.

In return, Aave Labs has requested funding to cover operating expenses that were previously covered by product revenue.

According to the text of the proposal, by diverting 100% of its revenue to DAO, Aave Labs will lose the ability to continue to self-fund. Without the ability to generate or earn revenue, it will be impossible to cover the costs of product development, business development and other operational functions.

Shortly after the vote was finalized, Kulechov himself wrote in his X account: The tempo check for the Aave Will Win proposal has passed. This brings Aave Labs closer to a fully tokenized model where all revenue from the product goes to $AAVE token holders.

Zeller’s post-vote analysis revealed some concerns that Aave Labs could increase its influence in governance by obtaining 75,000 AAVE tokens. One Aave user also spoke out on the forum, noting thatthe risk of the ACI consortium starting to capitalize on the coffers of the AAVE DAO is increasing because they don’t have that many AAVE tokens, but they are running the current operations.

The vote came just after Zeller released a report on Feb. 25 questioning the profitability of the roughly $86 million Aave Labs received in previous funding tranches ($16.2 million from the 2017 ICO, $32.5 million from venture rounds, $31.93 million in direct payments from the DAO, and approximately $5.5 million from unauthorized swap fees from aave.com).

Audit used return on investment (ROI) estimates to analyze Aave Labs’ historical funding. It attributed Aave Labs’ creation of V1, V2 and the original V3.0 codebase to Aave Labs, but argued that a significant portion of subsequent revenue growth was due to upgrades from DAO service providers.

Zeller estimated that V3.0 revenue totaled $3.33 million, significantly less than the $179 million generated after integrating upgrades from providers.

The same day, Aave Labs submitted its own report highlighting successful innovations such as the liquidity pool model, flash lending feature, security module and V3 efficiency mode that were developed before DAO began using the service provider structure.