DeFi leader Aave recently staged a large-scale drama! The community and team are arguing fiercely, giant whales are losing money and running away, the coin price reached a one-month low, and the trend is completely disconnected from the market, this gossip is nonstop~

Fuze: Hundreds of millions of dollars quietly "changed pockets"

The story starts on December 4th, Aave announced a partnership with Cow Swap, replacing ParaSwap as the front-end exchange partner. It was supposed to be a normal upgrade, but the community quickly noticed something was off: when using ParaSwap, the fees generated from exchanges (about $200,000 weekly, annualized over $10 million) all went into the community's public wallet (DAO treasury). After switching to Cow Swap, the money was directly transferred to Aave Labs team's address!

The key issue is that the team did not communicate this in advance and did not disclose it, which is equivalent to quietly taking tens of millions in income from the community's pockets into their own, how can the community not explode? Some netizens complained: 'This operation is like the boss secretly moving the company bonus, it's too unethical!'

Upgrade battle: Brand control needs to be 'divided'.

In the face of doubts, Aave Labs is quite justified: The front-end interface is built and maintained with our money, it belongs to the team product, and the income should belong to us; the previous distribution to the community was just a 'donation', not an obligation.

This statement directly ignited the powder keg! On December 16th, Aave's former CTO directly initiated a proposal: to hand over the brand, domain name, and social media accounts of Aave to the token holders. Once the proposal was released, the community exploded, nearly ten thousand people watched, and most supported it — after all, no one wants the brand control of the coins they hold to be in someone else's hands.

As a result, founder Stani came out to oppose it, saying the proposal was too hasty and oversimplified complex issues. In the eyes of the community, this is seen as 'not wanting to give up control', and the opposing sentiment has reached its peak, with some even saying 'for the first time, I want to clear out AAVE', and loyal fans complaining 'this is no different from a junk coin.'

Critical hit: The whale lost 13 million and sold off.

After a noisy night until the early hours of the 22nd, the final outcome arrived — the second largest whale of AAVE directly cleared out 230,000 coins, worth about 38 million USD. It should be noted that this whale bought at an average price of 223.4 USD from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, and this time sold off at 165 USD, losing a full 13.45 million USD!

This wave of sell-off directly caused AAVE to drop 12% in the short term, now quoted at 150.69 USD, creating a one-month low, and the trend is completely disconnected from the market, the previously hyped 'value coin representation' persona has completely collapsed.

Afterwards: Voting determines life and death, can AAVE still be saved?

Currently, the voting on brand control has been initiated, ending on December 26th, and token holders can vote and express their opinions. This result is crucial: if a consensus can be reached, it might restore confidence; if no agreement can be made, the contradictions will only grow larger.

In fact, this issue is not just Aave's problem; as DeFi grows larger, how to divide the interests of the team and the community, and how to delineate boundaries, are all unavoidable obstacles. Aave just happened to be the one that went far enough to encounter this first.

Now it all depends on the voting results and the team's subsequent attitude — do you think Aave can resolve this crisis?