Aave Founder Rejects Reported $385M Equity Sale at 70% Discount

AAVE News

The founder of Aave (AAVE) has publicly rejected a report claiming the decentralized lending protocol could sell equity at a steep discount, calling the framing inaccurate. The disputed account suggested Payward, the parent company of exchange Kraken, was negotiating to acquire a 15% stake in Aave for roughly $385 million — a valuation equal to only about 30% of AAVE’s fully diluted value, or close to a 70% discount. Responding on X, Stani Kulechov dismissed the premise outright, saying the team could never sell AAVE at a 70% discount. He stressed that the reported deal structure misrepresented ongoing conversations and did not reflect any agreed transaction.

While denying the discount narrative, Kulechov did not rule out that Aave Labs — the for-profit development firm behind the protocol — might sell part of its own AAVE allocation. He acknowledged that multiple market participants have discussed buying AAVE directly or indirectly as part of a broader, long-term partnership. The distinction matters: Aave Labs holds a separate token allocation, so any sale from that stash would be a treasury-level transaction rather than a protocol-level one. A buyer acquiring those tokens would not gain control of the Aave DAO, nor would protocol revenue be redirected to them.

Kulechov anchored his rejection of any discount in Aave’s earning power. The protocol now generates roughly $134 million in annualized revenue, and all of it flows to the Aave DAO rather than to Aave Labs. He emphasized that Aave Labs takes no share of protocol revenue and currently operates only as a service provider to the DAO, handling development and ecosystem growth. As a leading DeFi lending venue and a blue-chip altcoin, Aave’s revenue base underpins the argument that token-holder value should be captured through protocol economics, not surrendered cheaply to an outside acquirer.

The founder also previewed Aavenomics 3.0, a new token-economic model that would introduce an automatic, non-discretionary buyback mechanism designed to channel protocol income back into AAVE. Kulechov framed the upgrade as evidence that everyone at Aave Labs and the DAO ultimately works for the AAVE token. The mechanism is intended to convert the protocol’s revenue into sustained buy pressure without manual intervention, tightening the link between usage and token value. Full details of the buyback design have not yet been published, and the team has not disclosed a firm launch date for the revamped tokenomics.

The current revenue structure traces back to the Aave Will Win framework, a governance overhaul that passed with roughly 75% support in April 2026. Under the new rules, 100% of revenue from the Aave protocol and all Aave-branded products accrues to the DAO and AAVE holders, while the DAO commits multi-year development funding to Aave Labs. The framework followed a 2025 dispute in which Aave Labs routed interface swap fees to the company rather than the DAO, prompting several contributors to leave. Governance later approved a $25 million stablecoin grant and a 75,000 AAVE allocation to Aave Labs under the same framework.

On the product side, Aave rolled out a new risk-management framework this month to reduce exposure to incidents like April’s Kelp DAO exploit, where an attacker used Aave to swap stolen rsETH collateral into other assets, weighing on total value locked. The protocol also shipped its V4 release in March 2026, adopting a hub-and-spoke architecture that centralizes liquidity while routing risk to isolated spokes, improving cross-chain capital efficiency. Together with the planned buyback, these upgrades form the backbone of Aave’s effort to rebuild confidence after a stretch of TVL pressure and governance turbulence in a cautious bear market.

On the chart, COINOTAG’s proprietary 42-indicator composite scoring engine rates the $88.54 resistance at 76/100, driven by the confluence of the Fibonacci 0.500 retracement, the prior-day high and the Donchian upper band, with nearer resistance at $82.47 scored 72/100 from HVN 3 and the R2 pivot. The $81.25 support earns a strong 85/100, anchored by the Fibo 0.382 level, S1 and Ichimoku Senkou B. With AAVE near $82.70, RSI at 60.51 and a bullish MACD, derivatives stay neutral — funding at 0.0015% and open interest near $102 million — while a market-wide Fear & Greed reading of 13 signals extreme fear. A clean break above $82.47 opens $88.54; losing $81.25 invalidates the bullish case and exposes $76.38.