Aave DAO Votes To Pay Developers $15M

Retroactive Funding Will Cover Development and Audit Costs of Aave V3

Aave, the largest DeFi lending protocol with over $6B in total value locked (TVL), has voted to give its developers $15M in retroactive pay for their work building Aave V3, the latest iteration of the money market.

Aave TVL, Source: The Defiant Terminal

The vote passed with unanimous support.

The $15M in crypto assets will go to Aave Companies, which represents the team that built Aave V3. Another $1.3M will go toward the cost of third-party security audits of the V3 software. 

Aave V3 debuted in March and boasts a fully redesigned app with faster load times, a reduction of gas costs of between 20% and 25%, and new risk management features. 

It also supports cross-chain transactions between the various v3 deployments, a high capital efficiency mode enabling greater borrowing power, and isolated liquidity pairs allowing users to separately manage their positions for individual assets. It was the lending protocol’s first major upgrade since the release of Aave V2 in December 2020. 

Diverse Range Of Assets

The approved funds will be paid out in a variety of crypto assets from the Aave treasury, with about one-third denominated in leading dollar-pegged stablecoins USDC, USDT and DAI. Another $3M will be paid in ETH, BTC and various DeFi governance tokens, and more than $6M will be paid in AAVE, the protocol’s governance token.

In proposing retroactive funding for v3, Aave said it is “easier to agree on what was useful than what will be useful.”

“The benefit of hindsight allows the community to make an accurate and fair quantification of the work done on V3 against the backdrop of V3’s post-launch success,” the proposal reads, “as well as the potential for V3 moving forward.”

It is the first time Aave has voted to award retroactive pay, though it may do so again after the launch of GHO, a forthcoming dollar-pegged stablecoin.