Aave Labs advances plan to funnel all product revenue into DAO using V4 roadmap

Aave Labs has tabled a governance package that ties its next major software milestone, V4, to a new commercial and governance arrangement that would send the income from Aave-branded applications and enterprise tools straight to the community treasury. The proposal reframes the developer firm’s role as a long-term contributor under a token-aligned model and makes the V4 architecture the primary avenue for future expansion and product launches. On markets, the native token saw a modest uptick in price after the announcement, signaling some short-term investor approval even as broader crypto markets declined. Technically, V4 is presented as a modular expansion that lowers friction for spinning up new markets and financial products without repeated core changes, which could speed institutional integrations and feature rollouts. A notable governance change would route revenue from user-facing apps, institutional offerings and enterprise services built by the Labs to the DAO, broadening the protocol’s income sources beyond base lending fees. The package also proposes a dedicated legal vehicle to steward trademarks and domain assets, acknowledging that decentralized bodies often cannot directly hold intellectual property. That structural fix is intended to resolve a prior conflict over control of brand elements, which had raised questions about how much influence the founding team should retain. Operationally, channeling product revenue to the treasury aligns developer incentives with token-holder value capture, but it also shifts the burden of budget prioritization and risk allocation to on-chain governance. For institutional partners, the ability to create separate markets with tailored risk and revenue rules could lower barriers to adoption while isolating specialized activity from the core protocol. Risks remain: the success of this model depends on clear legal boundaries for the foundation, robust governance processes to allocate newly centralized revenue, and technical safeguards so V4 remains secure as a composable base. If the DAO approves follow-up votes to activate V4 and define funding flows, Aave could accelerate its push to be an infra layer for on-chain finance, but the transition will be politically charged and operationally complex. In short, the proposal is an aggressive bid to consolidate product economics under community control and to use a technical upgrade as the lever for broader strategic change; whether it reduces centralization concerns or merely reshuffles influence will depend on implementation details and governance discipline.