Stani Kulechov, the founder and CEO of Aave Labs, the lead development company behind Aave's decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol, denied claims that he recently purchased $15 million value of Aave (AAVE) tokens to influence a controversial community vote that didn’t pass.
“These tokens weren’t used to vote on the recent proposal, and that was never my intention. This is my life's work, and I put my very own capital into my belief,” Kulechov said.
He also said that Aave Labs didn’t clearly communicate the economic alignment between him and Aave token holders. “Going forward, we might be more explicit about how products developed by Aave Labs create value for DAO and AAVE token holders,” he added.
Source: Stan Kulechov
Several members of the Aave community accused Kulechov of buying Aave tokens so as to influence the governance vote in favor of Aave Labs by increasing his voting share.
Cointelegraph reached out to Kulechov for comment but didn’t receive a response on the time of publication.
Controversy over mental property rights arises within the Aave community
Kulechov's comments followed the outcomes of a community vote to bring Aave's brand assets under the control of Aave's Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), the community-led organization that manages the Aave DeFi protocol.
The proposal was submitted for community review after EzR3aL, a pseudonymous Aave DAO member, said that fees from a recent integration with decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator CoW Swap were routed to a wallet address controlled by Aave Labs.
The post about CoW swap fees sparked a debate throughout the Aave community. Source: Aave Governance
The fees generated by crypto-asset swaps using CoW Swap rightfully belong to the DAO, and the DAO must have been consulted before redirecting the fees, EzR3aL argued, sparking a firestorm of community backlash against Aave Labs.
Over 55% voted “no” to the proposal and over 41% abstained, while only 3.5% of the community voted in favor of the proposal.
Snapshot of the Aave community vote to bring the brand assets under the control of the Aave DAO. Source: Aave DAO
But even before the vote was accomplished, members of the Aave DAO expressed frustration, saying the vote was rushed and normal community governance procedures were ignored.
The writer of the proposal is called Ernesto Boado, a former chief technical officer at Aave Labs.
However, he said the proposal was listed without his knowledge or consent and he wouldn’t have agreed to its submission if he had been consulted before publication.
