DAOs Aren't Doomed, They Just Need to Evolve: Aave Founder

Aave DAO governance is broken — or at least that's the argument Stani Kulechov is now making publicly. The founder of the decentralized lending platform Aave took to X on Tuesday to argue that DAOs, in their current form, are failing: not because the idea is flawed, but because the execution has turned into a slow-motion political circus that gets less done than a mid-sized corporate committee.

Kulechov's Core Complaint: Too Many Votes, Too Little Action

The average proposal at a major DAO doesn't just get voted on — it gets forum-posted, temperature-checked, revised, re-checked, and voted on multiple times across weeks. Kulechov says the process has become 'extraordinarily difficult' in practice, with participants forming political alliances to trade favors and get their own proposals through. 'DAOs also become politicized very quickly,' he wrote, 'and it's easy for voting to become about attention.'

The numbers back up the frustration. Average participation rates in Aave and other major DAOs hover between 15% and 25% of token holders, which sounds manageable until you realize the other 75%–85% are either apathetic or simply priced out of caring. Low turnout plus loud factions equals exactly what Kulechov described: 'the worst parts of corporate bureaucracy, but without the parts that create accountability.'

It can often feel like we took the worst parts of corporate bureaucracy and removed the parts that create accountability in the name of decentralization. But that doesn't mean DAOs are doomed.

What Does Kulechov Actually Want to Change?

What is Kulechov's DAO reform proposal?

Kulechov's reform vision keeps the parts he believes work — on-chain rules via smart contracts, a publicly visible treasury, and token-holder input on major decisions — while stripping away day-to-day governance from the crowd. His argument: running a protocol at scale requires people who wake up every morning with the full context in their heads, not committees of thousands voting on routine operations. 'Someone needs to wake up every morning with the full context in their head and make hard calls,' he said.

That's the part worth scrutinizing. 'Leaders, not thousands of voters' sounds reasonable until you ask who picks the leaders, who holds them accountable, and whether that structure is meaningfully different from a standard corporate org chart with a decentralized treasury bolted on. Kulechov hasn't spelled that out yet — and the community is right to push for specifics.

• Rules stay encoded in smart contracts — no exception carve-outs
• Treasury remains fully transparent and publicly auditable
• Token holders retain a vote on major, protocol-level decisions
• Day-to-day operations delegated to accountable leadership teams

The Governance Crisis Already Playing Out at Aave

Kulechov's comments didn't come out of nowhere. The Aave Will Win Framework passed a temperature check on March 1, and almost immediately things unraveled. Shortly after, the Aave Chan Initiative — one of the most active governance delegates in the protocol — announced it was walking away from the Aave DAO entirely, citing concerns about governance standards and the voting dynamics that played out during the proposal process.

Then there's the January failure. A proposal to hand control of Aave's brand assets and intellectual property directly to the DAO was rejected, reigniting questions about where ultimate authority actually sits inside the Aave protocol. Three governance flashpoints in roughly ten weeks. The founder's 'DAOs need to evolve' post looks less like philosophical musing and more like a response to a genuine structural crisis.

Kulechov isn't alone in pushing for reform — Vitalik Buterin has also proposed using AI systems to strengthen DAO governance. But none of that changes the core tension: if token holders give up routine voting power to 'accountable teams,' the DAO brand becomes marketing. The decentralized part becomes decorative. That might be the trade-off Aave needs to survive — but it deserves to be called what it is.