what's Aave Chan Initiative?
Aave Chan Initiative is a community-led effort within the Aave ecosystem, aimed at enhancing governance participation and driving protocol growth. It focuses on decentralizing decision-making through active involvement in Aave Improvement Proposals (AIPs), fostering a vibrant community around the protocol's liquidity markets. The initiative supports Aave's core functionalities, such as non-custodial lending and borrowing with variable or stable interest rates, while promoting features like the GHO stablecoin and integrations with assets like Lido staked ETH. By organizing discussions, votes, and updates, it helps scale total value locked (TVL) and profitability, making Aave more accessible and efficient for users and developers.
Stani Kulechov purchased $12.6M AAVE tokens in December 2025.
Links
x.com/aavechanThe "Aave Will Win" framework proposal is currently being rejected by the Aave DAO according to community feedback and voting patterns.
Received approximately $86M historically from the DAO and is requesting an additional $51M in funding.
Generated approximately $140M in V3 revenue during 2025.
Contributed to growing WETH borrows from $1.1B to $5.87B through onboarding weETH, rsETH, and ezETH with recursive borrowing configuration, with 97.6% of WETH borrow demand traced to this stack.
Generated approximately $37M per year from LRT/eMode loop configurations, representing 28% of Aave protocol revenue.
Captured 85% of Ethena lending market versus Morpho's 13% through Ethena/Pendle flywheel strategy.
Generated $12.7M in direct revenue plus $5.8M in stablecoin borrow revenue from Ethena/Pendle flywheel, which peaked at $6.8B and currently stands at approximately $2.35B.
Contributed to growing GHO total supply 15x from $35M to $527M in collaboration with TokenLogic.
Processed 676 governance proposals in 2025, representing 61% of all Aave governance actions since inception.
Received $4.625M in compensation from Aave DAO since 2023 for 8 personnel, operating at approximately $3M per year cost.
Founder Marc Zeller appeared on The Crypto Beat live show on February 18, 2026.
Founder Stani Kulechov purchased approximately $12.6 million worth of AAVE tokens during December 2025.
Aave Chan Initiative accuses Aave Labs of diverting DAO revenues and demands clarity on CowSwap integration, vault fees, Horizon deals, and V4 liquidation engine incentives.
Aave Chan Initiative flags alleged stealth privatization of approximately 10% of Aave DAO's potential revenue and announces preparation of an official response regarding the governance issue affecting $AAVE token holders.
sGHO and FLUID rewards distributed to historical GHO Pendle LP holders on Stake DAO.
Launched incentive program via Merkl for syrupUSDT borrowers, reducing net borrowing APY to 3.94%. syrupUSDT went live on Aave as collateral with $50M cap. Distributed $101M incentives in 2025: $21.2M from DAO treasury and $80M from partners Ripple, Ethena, Plasma via Merit-as-a-Service.