Aave's current situation revealed: the business is hard core, but the valuation is being weighed down by the “big deal disease”
Author: 137Labs
Original title: Aave's real situation: The business is still strong, but the “big deal disease” has become the valuation ceiling
introduction
If you only look at on-chain volume, Aave is still one of the most dominant agreements on the DeFi lending circuit. According to the statement given by Token Terminal in its March 2026 report, Aave's TVL for the month was US$42.34 billion, with an active loan balance of US$16.55 billion, maintaining a 59.79% share of the DeFi lending market. The DeFiLama page shows that Aave currently lends about US$17.796 billion, revenue from the 30-day agreement is about US$6.1 million, and revenue from annualized agreements is about US$74.39 million. This shows that no matter which platform's statistical caliber is used, Aave is still the industry's core on-chain credit infrastructure.
But if you look one level further, you'll find that the focus of the market debate has changed.
In the past, Aave's core narrative was “scale growth, cross-chain expansion, stablecoin GHO promotion, and institutional business layout”;
Now, what is actually causing the market to reprice it is a set of lower level questions: whether repurchases and capital allocation are efficient, whether governance and execution are unbalanced, whether risk control capabilities are sustainable even after the loss of core contributors, and whether agreement revenue can be steadily converted into token value.
The withdrawal of Chaos Labs, the gradual departure of BGD Labs, and the withdrawal of ACI from governance discussions caused these originally only structural conflicts within the community to be exposed to a wider market perspective.
Seen from this perspective, Aave is not facing the problem of “not doing business”, but rather the problem of “how to continue to operate in a more mature corporate, fiscal, and institutionalized manner with an agreement that is already large”.
Because of this, Aave is currently more like a mid-stage financial institution: the asset size and brand are already very large, but capital allocation, organizational governance, and risk control responsibilities are beginning to become key variables in determining the upper valuation limit.
Data layer: Aave is still strong, but the growth logic has changed
Judging from the data, there was no “business collapse” for Aave. On the contrary, the problem is that its data is still strong, so structural issues are more worth being wary of.
According to Token Terminal's March 2026 report, Aave's March TVL was US$42.34 billion, up 45.45% year on year; active loan balance was US$16.55 billion, up 47.32% year on year; despite experiencing a monthly decline from February to March, both core indicators were significantly higher than the same period last year. At the same time, the report pointed out that the March fee revenue was $43.94 million, and the agreement revenue was 6.64 million US dollars, indicating that Aave still has a very strong ability to generate cash flow.
If you take these numbers apart, Aave's data has a few very notable characteristics.
First, it is not an agreement that “relies on idling TVL to support valuation”. An active loan of $16.55 billion in March, corresponding to a TVL of $42.34 billion, means that active loans/TVL is around 39%. This ratio is not low, indicating that the assets deposited into Aave are not just passively suspended, but are continuously transformed into real borrowing demand. As far as loan agreements are concerned, looking at TVL alone does not explain the problem; what really reflects capital efficiency is “how much loan balance, how much interest income, and how much agreement income can TVL convert.” In all three dimensions, Aave is still one of the strongest in the industry.
Second, Aave's revenue structure is shifting from a “single loan spread” to “diversified credit platform revenue.” According to the March report, GHO has been growing for three consecutive months, with a market capitalization exceeding US$514.5 million and contributing 10.65% of March agreement revenue. This means that Aave is no longer just an agreement that relies on fluctuations in market borrowing demand, but is trying to keep part of the value created by credit within its own system through its own stablecoins. For loan agreements, the significance of the stablecoin business is not only to add revenue, but also to increase revenue stickiness. Fees and revenue from pure loan agreements are often highly pro-cyclical. During a bull market, interest rates are high, borrowing is strong, and income expands; during a bear market, demand falls, interest rates are compressed, and revenue falls. However, once stablecoins form a network effect of minting, circulation, settlement, and collateral, the revenue curve is usually smoother than a simple lending business. The increase in GHO's share of revenue means that Aave is trying to reduce its “pure leveraged demand drive” cyclicality.
Third, Aave's growth has moved from “explosive expansion” to “steady state management with stock leaders.” Token Terminal's January report shows that at the beginning of 2026, Aave's TVL, active loans, fees, and revenue all increased month-on-month, but its January revenue of 9.96 million US dollars was still down 34.27% from the 15.15 million US dollars in January 2025; by February and March, the report also showed that TVL and active loans experienced a monthly decline, and expenses and revenue were more clearly “normalized”. This set of data shows two things: first, Aave is not losing its market position, but “returning to normal” after experiencing a high base; second, the lending business is still inherently highly dependent on market fluctuations, interest rate environments, and clearing activities, so revenue cannot grow as linearly as SaaS companies. For valuation, this means that Aave is more suited to be viewed as a financial infrastructure with a “strong cycle, high cash flow, and low linear growth” rather than a high-multiple growth stock.
Fourth, Aave's multi-chain layout is still strengthening its systemic position. According to DeIllama data, Aave's current TVL on Ethereum is about 20.595 billion US dollars, and at the same time, it has formed a considerable stock on multiple chains such as Plasma, Arbitrum, Base, Mantle, and Avalanche, indicating that its liquidity and credit business are not limited to a single chain environment. Meanwhile, the March report mentioned that the Ethereum mainnet still contributes more than 82% of TVL and 80.8% of active loans. The meaning of this structure is that Aave has formed a pattern of “deep main chain liquidity + multi-chain distribution”: core risk pricing and capital depth are still concentrated on Ethereum, but user entry and scenario touchpoints are expanding outward. For industry leaders, this is a healthier way to expand than simply pursuing full-chain traffic.
Therefore, the conclusion drawn from the data level is not that “Aave has weakened,” but rather: Aave is still very strong as a business entity, even stronger than many people think; it is also because the business is strong enough that issues of governance, risk control, and capital allocation will be amplified into core contradictions at the valuation level.
Core event: What does Chaos exit mean
If the data layer shows “why Aave is still the leader,” then Chaos Labs' exit explains “why the market is initially unwilling to simply evaluate at the top premium”.
According to public information, Chaos Labs has been responsible for risk management in the Aave V2 and V3 markets since November 2022. Aave Labs proposed to raise the budget to 5 million US dollars, but the two sides had “fundamental differences” on risk management priorities and methods, and eventually Chaos decided to terminate the cooperation. The reason given by Chaos is critical: under the new V4 architecture, operational and legal burdens have increased significantly, and the current budget is insufficient to support risk management of this scale.
The importance of this incident was not that “one more service provider was missing,” but that it moved to Aave's core moat. The reason why Aave has become a leading DeFi lending leader in the past few years is not only because of its mature product design, but also because it has maintained strong resilience to risks under extreme market conditions. The risk control team's job is not to “write a set of parameters and then not change”, but to continuously fine-tune supply limits, loan limits, collateral limits, settlement thresholds, and risk exposure under multiple shocks such as market fluctuations, liquidity withdrawal, orbital fluctuations, and settlement link congestion. In other words, Aave's risk control has never been a passive rule, but rather an operational capability accumulated over a long period of time. Because of this, Chaos Labs' departure was interpreted by the market as a “loss of risk control experience capital” rather than an ordinary supplier rotation.
If you look at this in conjunction with the scale of Aave's business, the tension will be even more obvious. Currently, Aave's loan scale is already in the range of 16 billion to 18 billion US dollars. The balance of loans under the DeFilLama caliber is close to 17.796 billion US dollars, and active loans under the Token Terminal caliber in March are about 16.55 billion US dollars. For a credit market of this size, risk control mistakes don't need to be made many times; one or two parameter distortions may result in huge liquidations, capital flight, or market trust discounts. In other words, when agreements have become systemically important infrastructure for the industry, the marginal value of risk control teams is not linear, but rather amplified. Aave's steady operation over the past three years has largely shaped the market's perception that “it can always survive extreme markets”; the withdrawal of Chaos Labs has caused this perception to begin to crack.
More importantly, this is not a single point of event. Before Chaos Labs withdrew, BGD Labs had already entered the exit process, and ACI also announced its withdrawal from the governance role. In other words, Aave's three most critical execution links of development, governance, and risk control all experienced disruptions at the personnel or organizational level in a short period of time. Looking at any one thing alone can be interpreted as a normal adjustment; but when the three pillars fluctuate at the same time, the market naturally begins to wonder whether Aave is experiencing the pain of transitioning from a “founding team - service provider alliance” to “DAO corporate governance,” and whether this pain will exceed its organizational carrying capacity.
Therefore, the real meaning of Chaos Labs' withdrawal is: the value of the Aave risk control system was “re-proven” by the market for the first time. In the past, Aave was able to gain trust by relying on its historical reputation; in the future, it will need to rely on systems, budgets, handover mechanisms, and new service provider capabilities to win back this trust.
Governance crisis: Why responsibilities and rights are unbalanced
Many people would attribute Aave's recent controversy to “differences within DAO” or “typical community governance struggles,” but when looking at finance and organizational structure, this issue is much deeper than ordinary governance. Discussions on the “Aave Will Win Framework,” “Funding Insights,” and “Buyback Budget Adjustment” in the Aave Forum essentially all revolved around the same issue: how the money earned from the agreement should be distributed among repurchases, growth investments, service provider budgets, and risk preparation.
Judging by public data, Aave isn't without money. DeFilLama shows that Aave's current treasury is about US$85.77 million, of which stablecoins are about US$36.27 million and its own tokens are about US$32.58 million. ETH-related assets are also an important component. The Governance Forum further stated that DAO holds approximately $39.9 million in ETH-related assets and discussed switching some of the repurchase funds from stablecoins to ETH to reduce asset mismatches and extend the stablecoin runway. In other words, Aave's question was never “poor,” but “how to spend money better”.
The problem is that Aave has entered a typical “grand deal fiscal conundrum”: revenue is not small, but spending commitments are growing at the same time. The Aave Governance Forum clearly stated in the March 2026 buyback budget adjustment proposal that revenue for the full year of 2025 was about US$142 million, while the estimated operating budget for the 2026 “optimistic scenario” reached US$190 million, forming a structural gap compared to the income level of 2025. At the same time, revenue from borrowing expenses has fallen by about 25% from the peak. Revenue in January 2026 was only 7.95 million US dollars, significantly lower than the 13.5 million US dollars in January 2025. This shows that Aave is facing a typical medium-term governance dilemma: while maintaining the market's expectations for token value capture, it also has to continue to invest in products, institutionalization, application layers, and risk control systems. As a result, every expenditure seems “reasonable,” but when added up, it also reduces the margin of financial security.
A deeper contradiction is the misalignment of responsibilities and powers. DAO formally controls resource allocation rights, service providers and development teams assume execution responsibilities, and risk control teams bear the most critical systemic risks, but in the end, the benefits are more reflected in token holders and long-term ecological valuations. There was no problem with this structure in the early days of small agreements, because everyone collaborated around a consensus on growth; but when the size of the agreement was large enough, the role of service provider was specialized, and the budget reached the level of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, the mismatch of responsibilities quickly escalated. The withdrawal of Chaos Labs is essentially the externalization of this mismatch: the party that bears extremely high systemic responsibility does not think that it has received sufficient budget, authorization, and long-term guarantees.
Seen from this perspective, Aave's current so-called “governance storm” is actually not a problem of community sentiment, but rather an organizational evolution issue. It's no longer an agreement that only relies on the appeal of the founders, community voting, and tacit collaboration among several core service providers to run smoothly. As new businesses such as V4, Aave App, Aave Pro, and Horizon advance simultaneously, Aave is more like an on-chain financial group with multiple product lines, multiple stakeholders, and a complex budget structure. For such organizations, if governance remains at the level of “discussing how much to pay for a proposal,” it will increasingly fall short of keeping up with business reality.
Value capture: Why buybacks still haven't solved the valuation problem
Aave DAO has implemented the AAVE repurchase program since April 2025. By March 2026, it had repurchased more than 205,000 AAVE, accounting for about 1.28% of the total supply. Many people have an old impression that Aave has always lacked a clear repurchase mechanism, but the latest governance information shows that Aave DAO has implemented an AAVE repurchase plan since April 2025, and has repurchased more than 205,000 AAVE by March 2026, accounting for about 1.28% of the total supply. The initial annualized budget was around $50 million, but was later proposed to be lowered to $30 million due to revenue and budget pressure. This shows that Aave has gone from “no repurchase” to a stage of “having a repurchase but having to re-evaluate its financial soundness”.
But a buyback doesn't mean the value problem has been solved. Because capital markets are more concerned about three things:
First, whether buybacks are supported by sustainable free cash flow;
Second, whether buybacks are squeezing the necessary growth investment;
Third, does the repurchase actually enhance the economic equity of each unit of token.
Here at Aave, all three points are still debated. The Governance Forum clearly stated that revenue from borrowing expenses fell by about 25% from its peak, and revenue in 2026 was not as generous as it might seem on the surface. Therefore, the repurchase budget was lowered from $50 million to $30 million in order to preserve more operating and growth runways. In other words, the Aave community has realized that mechanical high-intensity repurchases are not necessarily the optimal capital allocation at this stage.
If you look at the data, this judgment is not difficult to understand. DeIllama's current Aave annualized agreement revenue is about 74.39 million US dollars, and the 30-day agreement revenue is about 6.1 million US dollars; assuming execution according to an annualized repurchase budget of 30 million US dollars, then the repurchase will consume a significant percentage of the agreement revenue. If revenue continues to be compressed by the market environment, and Aave also has to invest in V4, apps, institutional business, and risk control services, then the crowding out effect of repurchases on finance will increase. In other words, instead of having no shareholder returns, Aave is now entering a capital allocation problem that traditional companies also face between “buyback and reinvestment.”
Furthermore, the value capture of AAVE tokens is still not completely “closed loop.” Although Aave already has repurchases, the current “holder revenue” is still very limited under Token Terminal and DeIllama's caliber. The DeFiLama page shows that Aave's revenue for the past 30 days is 0, and the annualized token holder income is also 0. This means that Aave's token value capture currently still mainly relies on buyback expectations, governance rights, pledges, and supply contraction, rather than having stable, transparent, and predictable cash distribution rights like traditional stocks. As a result, the market will continue to ask whether the AAVE purchased will be locked down, destroyed, and redistributed over a long period of time, and whether token holders are getting definitive benefits from it, or is it just an expectation of supply contraction. As long as this path isn't clear enough, there will still be a discount between protocol revenue and token valuation.
As a result, Aave's current value capture problem has been upgraded from “whether to do a repurchase” to “how to make repurchase a higher quality capital allocation tool”. In the long run, this is even more important than simply increasing the buyback budget. Because for a mature agreement, the optimal solution is usually not to use all free cash flow to buy coins, but rather to establish a clear, predictable, and auditable distribution framework between financial security, business expansion, risk preparation, and token returns. Aave is on its way to this point, but apparently hasn't quite done it yet.
AAVE token valuation and comparison with peers: Why is the market giving it a leading premium, and why is it pressing not to make it more expensive
If we put Aave back into the DeFi lending and on-chain credit circuit, AAVE's valuation should not only look at market capitalization, but also on four levels at the same time:
First, how much real revenue was generated by the agreement itself;
Second, how much of this revenue actually goes back to token holders;
Third, token valuation corresponds to how many large-scale credit assets;
Fourth, whether the agreement's finance is stable enough.
According to DeFilLama's current caliber, Aave's annualized revenue is about 74.39 million US dollars, the market value is about 1.44 billion US dollars, the loan scale is about 17.796 billion US dollars, and the treasury is about 85.77 million US dollars;
Morpho's market value is about US$944 million, and the annualized cost is about US$140 million, but both agreement revenue and shareholders' income are currently showing zero, the loan amount is about US$4.312 billion, and the treasury is about US$34.22 million;
Spark has a market value of about $51.63 million, annualized revenue of about 7.67 million US dollars, annual income of coin holders about 6.38 million US dollars, loan scale of about 1 billion US dollars, and a treasury of about 61.4 million US dollars;
Maker has now changed its name to Sky. SKY has a market capitalization of about US$1,801 million, annualized revenue of about US$178.3 million, annual revenue of coin holders of about US$29.89 million, and treasury of about US$147.7 million.
When these data are put together, AAVE's valuation position will be much clearer.
Let's take a look at the most intuitive valuation multiples first. Based on a rough calculation of current market value and annualized revenue, the market sales ratio corresponding to AAVE is about 19.4 times, Sky is about 10.1 times, and Spark is about 6.7 times; Morpho cannot be measured using normal P/S because the contract revenue under the DeFiLama caliber is 0. It can only be said that it is currently priced based on “future cost switches and future governance and monetization capacity” rather than the current agreed cash flow.
In other words, AAVE is not the most expensive “story coin” in these projects, but it is an asset with a clear leading premium: it is more expensive than Sky, far more expensive than Spark, and closer to “cash flow valuation” in the traditional sense of the word than Morpho, which currently has no closed loop of revenue. From this perspective, what the market gives AAVE is not pure imagination, but “leading position + verified revenue + repurchase expectations + stability premium after risk discount”.
However, if you look further at the “market value corresponding to the credit size of a unit,” AAVE is not necessarily expensive. The current market value of Aave is about 1.44 billion US dollars, corresponding to a loan scale of 17.796 billion US dollars. The market capitalization/loan size is about 0.081 times; Morpho is about 0.219 times; and Spark is about 0.052 times. This set of data shows that although AAVE is expensive in terms of revenue multiples, when measured by the amount of credit it carries, the valuation is not exaggerated; on the contrary, it is in the “leading but not outrageous” range.
The reason why Morpho looks more expensive is because the current token market value is already at a high level, but the agreement's cash flow hasn't started at the same time, and the market is actually paying for its product paradigm, institutional narrative, and potential fee switch in advance; Spark seems to be the cheapest because SPK just benefits from the “small market capitalization + cash flow from existing coin holders + sufficient treasury” window period, but its business scale and ecological depth are also significantly smaller than Aave. In other words, AAVE is more expensive in terms of cash flow multiples and cheaper in terms of credit; Morpho is more expensive in terms of expectations, Spark is cheaper in size, and Sky is more like a mature stablecoin central bank asset.
Next, more critical is “quality of value capture.” What's special about Aave is that it's no longer a protocol with no token returns at all. DeFilLama clearly states that Aave has been using the treasury for AAVE repurchases since April 9, 2025; however, the current page shows zero annual holder income, with a cumulative shareholder revenue of about US$42.21 million, indicating that Aave's value return mechanism exists, but it is not stable, continuous, and linearly released under the current caliber. In contrast, Sky's coin holders' annualized revenue is about 29.89 million US dollars, Spark is about 6.38 million US dollars, and the Spark page clearly states that SPK holders' revenue comes from repurchases driven by agreement surpluses. Morpho is the weakest. Currently, both protocol revenue and token holder income are 0. This means that if you just look at “who has the clearest token equity today,” the ranking is roughly Sky > Spark > Aave > Morpho. AAVE is not without return in value, but its holders' earnings have yet to form a more stable and visible cash flow mentality like Sky. This is why AAVE has always been easily questioned by the market about “making money through agreements, but Binance does not necessarily make money at the same time.”
If you look at the financial security cushion, Aave is also in a moderately stable position. The Aave treasury is about US$85.77 million, or about 6% of its market value; the Morpho treasury is about US$34.22 million, or 3.6% of the market value; the Sky treasury is about US$147.7 million, or 8.2% of the market value; Spark is the most special, with a treasury of about US$61.4 million, which is even higher than its market value of $51.63 million. This set of data tells us that the reason Spark is viewed as “undervalued” by some market participants is not only because of its low revenue ratio, but also because its net assets are very high, which almost forms a balance sheet safety margin; Sky has both high income and strong finance; Aave's finances are not bad, but it is not exaggerated to easily cover all disputes over growth, buybacks, and risk control expenses; Morpho's finances are relatively lighter, so it is more dependent on future growth to continue to be realized. In other words, AAVE's margin of safety exists, but it isn't thick enough to overwhelm market concerns about governance and team loss.
Therefore, after putting these projects together, AAVE's valuation characteristics are actually very clear. It's not the cheapest on the track, nor is it the most expensive; its biggest characteristic is that “cash flow has been verified, but the return of value is not clear enough; the credit scale is far ahead, but the organizational structure is dragging down the premium.” Compared with Sky, AAVE's revenue multiplier is higher, indicating that the market is still willing to pay a premium for its leading lending status; however, Sky's coin holders have more clear income and are more financially strong, and in a sense, the “solidity” of the valuation is stronger than AAVE. Compared to Morpho, AAVE is more stable because the latter is currently closer to a “high cost, low monetization, and strong expectations” growth asset; compared to Spark, AAVE is obviously not cheap, but Spark's small market value and high treasury share also mean that it is more like a highly elastic target rather than a systemically important leader.
When it comes to investment judgments, these four projects can be roughly divided into four types of valuation logic.
Sky represents a stable asset with “mature cash flow + more clear return to holders”;
Morpho represents a growing asset “with advanced product forms, but token cash flow has yet to be opened”;
Spark represents a flexible asset with “small market capitalization, high net assets, and existing repurchases”;
Aave, on the other hand, represents a leading asset “the largest, with mature revenue, but uncertainty in governance and risk control suppresses valuations.”
Precisely because of this, what AAVE deserves the most attention right now is not whether it can continue to expand TVL, but rather whether it can change its “leading premium” from a narrative premium to an institutional premium through more stable buyback execution, a more transparent financial framework, and risk control system reconstruction. As long as this is not solved, it will be difficult for AAVE to be priced as a purer cash flow asset by the market like Sky; but if solved, it is also most likely to regain a higher valuation anchor in these projects.
Industry perspective: Aave's problem is actually a microcosm of the entire DeFi lending circuit entering a new stage
Putting Aave's problem into the larger industry context makes it easier to see why it matters. After experiencing rapid expansion in the early days, the DeFi lending circuit is now entering a new phase: the market no longer only rewards “TVL growth” and “speed of new asset launch,” but is increasingly focusing on risk management, fiscal discipline, real revenue, and institutional resilience. The reason why Aave is the best sample to observe this stage of transformation is because it has the largest scale, the most complete product, and the longest history, and as a result, it was the first to reveal these “major agreement diseases.”
This shift can also be seen in the data. According to Aave's March report, although TVL and active loans remained high, expenses and revenue declined significantly compared to February. The reason was clearly attributed to a lack of one-time settlement income and SVR revenue. This shows that income from loan agreements is not a stable annuity stream, but is significantly affected by the settlement cycle, fluctuating environment, and interest rate compression. The Governance Forum also pointed out that income from borrowing expenses fell by about 25% from the peak. In other words, even though Aave is already number one in the industry, its revenue quality is still unable to completely escape the market cycle. This is a common operating characteristic of the entire DeFi lending industry.
At the same time, Aave is a step further than a regular loan agreement because it has begun to build revenue sources and distribution portals “outside of loan agreements.” The March report mentioned that the Aave App targets a wider range of consumer finance portals, Aave Horizon targets tokenized real-world assets and institutional loans, and Aave Pro connects to more conservative institutional credit scenarios; Horizon has an average TVL of about US$5015.5 billion, and the average size of a single institutional loan is about US$1,118 million, which is about 16 times the agreement average. This data shows that Aave is trying to upgrade itself from a pure DeFi lending protocol to an on-chain credit platform covering retail, institutional, stablecoins, and application-layer distribution.
The problem also lies here: as business boundaries become wider, the original DAO governance and service provider collaboration model is more likely to fail. Early DeFi protocols only needed to manage a core product; today's Aave also handles protocol-level revenue, application-layer revenue, token repurchases, institutional marketplaces, risk budgeting, product development, and multi-chain deployment. The conflict it revealed is actually something that the entire industry will gradually encounter: how to operate a decentralized agreement like a mature financial institution after expanding, without losing the legitimacy of decentralization.
Therefore, what Aave is most worth studying today is not only whether it will continue to be number one, but whether it can break out of a “large-scale agreement governance paradigm” for the DeFi industry. If it can establish a more clear system between buyback, budget, risk control, and growth investment, then it will further consolidate its leading position; if not, then the current contradictions revealed by Aave may also become a common risk for the entire industry in the future.
The final conclusion
Overall, Aave's current most accurate judgment should be this:
First, Aave's business fundamentals are still very strong, and can even be said to be stronger than many emotional market discussions. Whether it's a TVL of $42.34 billion, active loans of $16.55 billion, a borrowing market share close to 60%, or an annualized agreement revenue capacity of around $74.39 million, it's enough proof that it is still the core infrastructure for DeFi lending. From a business perspective alone, Aave is not an agreement in decline, but a mature agreement that is steadily leading the way, but the growth rate is slowing down.
Second, Aave's real risk comes from the organizational and financial layers. The exit of Chaos Labs, the departure of BGD Labs, and the withdrawal of ACI indicate that Aave is undergoing a restructuring of the core execution system; while the repurchase budget was lowered from 50 million US dollars to 30 million US dollars, the operating budget was higher than the previous year's revenue, and borrowing expenses fell 25% from the peak, which indicates that DAO can no longer use “growth will cover everything” to cover up capital allocation issues. What Aave needs to solve today is not to make a few more proposals, but to establish a mature governance system that makes the market believe in its fiscal discipline, sustainable risk control, and compatible incentives.
Finally, Aave's valuation logic changed as a result. In the past, the market was willing to price it as a “DeFi growth leader”; now, the more reasonable approach is to value it as “on-chain financial infrastructure+ cyclical cash flow assets+large organization in governance transformation.” Such assets will not lose their long-term value due to a drop in monthly income, but they will not naturally enjoy unlimited premiums because they are number one in the industry. Whether Aave can continue to receive high valuations in the future depends not on whether it can expand TVL, but on whether it can answer four questions: can risk control be rebuilt, can repurchases be of higher quality, can the budget be more transparent, and whether token value capture can be more sustainable.
At the end of the day, Aave is now at a very typical inflection point: it has proven itself to be a successful big deal, but it hasn't fully proven itself to be a mature big deal.
Twitter:https://twitter.com/BitpushNewsCN
Compare the TG exchange group:https://t.me/BitPushCommunity
Compare TG subscriptions:https://t.me/bitpush
