ACI Departure Deepens Governance Turmoil Inside Aave DAO

TL;DR:

• ACI announced it will not renew its contract with Aave DAO and will execute a four-month exit process beginning in March.
• Over three years, ACI drove 61% of governance actions, revenue strategies equivalent to 48% of the protocol, and $101M in incentives.
• Its departure follows BGD Labs, which also announced its withdrawal by April 2026, deepening the governance crisis at Aave.

The Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), one of the most significant delegated service providers in the governance ecosystem of Aave, has announced its definitive departure from the protocol. Marc Zeller, founder of the project, published the decision on the Aave governance forum, confirming that the team will not renew its contract and will execute a four-month transition process aimed at transferring infrastructure and responsibilities to the DAO or to successor teams.

In his statement, Zeller was direct about the reasons for the break: over three years, he built a culture of accountability within the DAO based on transparent reporting, on-chain verification, and delegate management. When those same standards were applied to the largest budget request in the DAO’s history, the system failed.

According to Zeller, the Temp Check vote on the “Aave Will Win” proposal was decided by addresses linked to Aave Labs voting on their own budget, a condition ACI considers incompatible with the existence of independent service providers.

ACI Exposes a Governance Crisis Aave Cannot Ignore

Its operational weight within the protocol was far from minor. Its eight-person team managed 61% of all governance actions, designed revenue strategies representing 48% of the protocol’s income, and deployed $101 million in incentives over three years. It also drove the growth of GHO, Aave’s native stablecoin, from $35 million to $527 million.

Despite its departure, ACI committed to ensuring an orderly transition. The team will submit a direct proposal to cancel its GHO revenue stream and transfer the equivalent of 120 days to the DAO treasury. It will also open-source all its governance tools, dashboards, and incentive programs so that successor teams can operate without interruption.

There is an enormous institutional tension within Aave. BGD Labs, the team responsible for building and maintaining the V3 codebase, also recently announced its withdrawal by April 2026 citing similar issues. The departures mark a breaking point and call into question how the DAO distributes power among its independent contributors and its central actors, and whether the decentralized governance model Aave champions can hold when the accumulation of voting power contradicts that very principle.