Internal doubts at Aave about Labs' past performance: raised $86 million, holds 23% of tokens, all six products failed or incurred losses

On February 25th, Marc Zeller, founder of the Aave ecosystem contribution organization ACI, released a public report revealing that since 2017, Aave Labs has received approximately $86 million in capital support, including ICOs, VC funding, and direct DAO grants. The founding team retained 23% of the LEND tokens during the 2017 ICO (later migrated to AAVE at a 100:1 ratio). The report states that before receiving DAO funds, Labs had a capital base of about $48.7 million, and later received approximately $37.4 million in grants from the DAO. Currently, they are applying for an additional $51 million through the “Aave Will Win” proposal. The report questions the performance of Labs’ past products, noting that six independent products launched outside the core protocol have all failed or not achieved profitability. Among them, the RWA project Horizon claimed to have surpassed $1 billion in scale, but the actual RWA collateral was about $135 million, heavily concentrated in a single asset. Since its launch in August 2025, Horizon has generated about $216,000 in total revenue for the DAO, with incentives and related costs totaling around $5.25 million, resulting in a return on investment of approximately 24:1. The report also points out that early core developers of Aave V1, V2, and V3.0 left Labs between 2021 and 2022. V3.0 is considered the last major protocol version led by Labs, with subsequent versions mainly driven by DAO service providers. In governance votes, a single large delegated address played a key role in passing the Horizon proposal, sparking community discussions about governance power centralization and fund utilization efficiency. These controversies come at a time when a new $17.5 million product growth funding proposal is under review, further fueling discussions within the Aave community about fund allocation, performance disclosure, and governance transparency.