GM. This is Milk Road PRO, where the pain might not be over for Aave despite the broader market finally breaking out.

AAVE is down 75% from its 2025 high. 

Not all of that is self-inflicted. 

The broader market has been brutal on token prices, and even a perfectly run protocol would be bleeding in this market. 

But meaningful damage belongs to the story we are about to lay out.

Every headline traces back to the same shift: power inside Aave is quietly moving from the DAO and its independent contributors to Aave Labs, the company. 

Read the events one by one, and the protocol looks fatally fractured. 

Read them as one story, and the picture makes sense. Not better. Just clearer.

Our call: bearish at these levels. 

A 25x revenue multiple is hard to justify when revenues are down 70%, buyback ammunition is nearly spent, and the people who built the protocol's credibility walked out in the same weeks that V4 took its first deposits.

Here is what we cover:

THE UPGRADE THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

V4 launched on the Ethereum mainnet on March 30, 2026, announced at EthCC in Cannes. 

This is not a version bump. It is a complete rearchitecture built around a hub-and-spoke model, and this may be the closest Aave has come to its end-game design. 

To see why that matters, start with what V3 got wrong.

In V3, every market was its own island: 

If you wanted to launch a new market with different risk rules, you had to find new depositors to fill it. 

❌ Liquidity was scattered across dozens of pools, and most of them were too shallow to be useful.

V4 fixes this by splitting the system into two.

Hubs hold the money. 

Three launched on day one: Core, Prime, and Plus. Think of a Hub as a shared vault that many different lending products can draw from.

Spokes set the rules. 

A Spoke is a lending environment with its own collateral list, liquidation logic, interest curves, and risk parameters. Spokes do not hold deposits themselves. 

They borrow from a Hub, inside caps the Hub enforces.

The flow looks like this: 

✅ Now everyone can plug into liquidity that already exists. 

A brand new institutional RWA market, a liquid-staking strategy, or an Ethena-specific environment can all tap the same $26B pool on the day they open.

Liquidity is what matters in financial markets. The reason is simple: liquidity begets liquidity. 

Aave v4 is helping the protocol in 3 ways: 

That is the whole thesis in one line. 

👉 V4 separates where liquidity lives from how it gets lent out, so Aave can grow in every direction at once without diluting itself.

Before V4, Morpho was eating Aave's lunch. 

Its edge was customization: lenders and borrowers could shape markets in ways Aave's rigid pools could not match. 

V4 closes that gap, bringing more users, more use cases, and ultimately more revenue.💪 

On architecture alone, it is hard not to be bullish.

But it is not all roses. 

In the run-up to launch, Aave pushed through a new integration that cascaded into a full-blown drama. And rightfully so.

THE REVENUE FIGHT 

It begins in December 2025 with what looks like a routine technical integration. 

Aave's frontend added a CoW Swap integration that routed token-swap fees. 

A community member flagged something unusual: those fees were flowing to Aave Labs, not the Aave DAO treasury, and the routing change had not been put to a governance vote. 

A forum debate escalated quickly. 

⁉️ What started as a fee-routing question widened into a broader argument about who owns Aave's revenue streams, who owns the Aave brand, and who ultimately controls the protocol.

In January, Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov (founder of Aave) published a post titled “How Aave will win.” 

It aimed to bring resolution to all this drama and make everything clear once and for all. 

That document evolved into a funding proposal asking the DAO for roughly $51M in stablecoins and 75,000 AAVE tokens to fund V4 development, marketing, and ecosystem expansion. 

It was explicitly the largest budget request in Aave DAO history.

In exchange, Aave Labs offered to redirect 100% of revenue from all Aave-branded products to the DAO treasury. 

Passing the proposal helped investors get their arms around the revenue question and shut the door on value leaking to outside parties.

That is a good outcome, even if you could argue it should have been the default rather than something the DAO had to fight over.

Still, the big question hangs over all of it:

We don’t know yet. 

Time will tell. 

But all that drama cascaded into something even bigger. 

And sometimes, a moment like this is exactly what surfaces the answer to the question hanging over the protocol and its control.

THE CONTRIBUTOR EXODUS

BGD Labs went first.

On February 20, 2026, the team behind most of Aave's V3 codebase and the current governance machinery announced it would not renew its contract. 

Their resignation pointed to a structural imbalance: Aave Labs controlled branding and direction, and every improvement BGD proposed for V3 ran into the same wall, namely the competing push to migrate everything to V4.

TLDR: BGD got pushed out. 

Maybe by design, maybe by drift. Either way, the people still in the room saw it, and one of them refused to let it pass without saying something.

That person was Marc Zeller.

On March 3, the founder of the Aave Chan Initiative announced ACI was done. 

Four months to wind down, and then gone. No softening language, no diplomatic exit.

What ACI built over three years was not a small thing:

The bill to the DAO for all of it? Around $4.6M.

Zeller has a reputation for being abrasive. 

People who have worked with him will tell you that, and they are not wrong. 

But treating him as just a difficult personality misses the arithmetic. Few individuals in DeFi have moved the needle for a single protocol the way he did for Aave.

When he told The Block what tipped him over, the answer was one line: BGD leaving. 

The logic was not complicated. 

❗ If the team writing the code could not hold a seat at the table as independents, no one else stood a chance. 

Zeller was reading between the lines.

Two of Aave's most important outside contributors looked at the same situation and reached the same conclusion in the span of two weeks. 

Not that Aave Labs was doing anything dramatic. It was too quiet to be dramatic.

The center of gravity was shifting, one decision at a time, away from the DAO and toward the company. 

For an initiative literally named after decentralized governance, that is not a tension you can negotiate around.

And just when it seemed the worst was behind them, the worst showed up.

Chaos Labs made it three.

On April 6, seven days after V4 went live, CEO Omer Goldberg announced that Chaos was done too. 

The timing alone was brutal. 

This was not a quiet wind-down during a calm stretch. 

❗ This was the protocol's risk manager walking out the door in the same week its biggest architectural overhaul in years started taking real user deposits.

And Chaos was not a minor player. 

Since November 2022, it had been the team watching Aave's back: 

Not one of those liquidations produced a materially bad debt event. 

That’s the kind of record you frame, not the kind you walk away from lightly.

Goldberg gave three reasons:

1. The economics never worked

Chaos had been running at a loss on the Aave engagement for three straight years. Aave Labs offered to bump the budget from $3M to $5M. 

Goldberg said the real number needed to properly cover both V3 and V4 was closer to $8M. 

Set that against Aave's roughly $142M in 2025 protocol revenue, and the math gets uncomfortable fast. Traditional banks spend 6 to 10% of revenue on risk and compliance. Aave was offering a fraction of that to secure the entire system.

2. V4 changes the job

Hub-and-spoke is not just a new version of the same architecture. 

It introduces new edge cases, new composability failure modes, and new attack surfaces. 

That means new tooling, new simulations, new oracle integrations, all built from a blank page. And V3 does not disappear the moment V4 ships. It needs parallel coverage for however long the migration takes, which Goldberg pointed out has historically been years, not months.

3. Disagreement on future risk management 

This is the quiet one; he and Aave Labs no longer agreed on how risk should be prioritized as V4 scales. 

That is vendor-speak for a disagreement that could not be bridged.

Stani Kulechov tried to steady the market by calling the departures evolution, not dysfunction.

That framing is not wrong, exactly. 

It’s also the framing every CEO reaches for when they are quietly letting go of vendors they no longer want in the room.

But the motivations matter less than the shape of what happened.

From 2023 through 2025, Aave ran on a small cast of specialized teams, each one owning a critical function:

That model made Aave one of the most professional DAOs in DeFi. 

It also concentrated the protocol's institutional knowledge into a very small number of hands. 

And when the three most important pairs of hands walked out inside six weeks, the damage was not a gap in the org chart. 

It was a gap in memory. 

👉 The kind of context you only build by running a system for years, watching it break in small ways, and remembering exactly how you fixed it.

That memory was walking out the door at the worst possible moment. 

V4's migration is the phase where that knowledge is most valuable, because it is the phase where new failure modes show up first.

So the token is taking a beating through all this? Not surprising. And the bleeding was not done yet.

THE HACK

To understand what happened on April 18, you need to understand how Aave actually works. 

When a user deposits ETH, they can borrow against it. Simple. 

But Aave also accepts more exotic collateral, like liquid restaking tokens. 

rsETH, issued by Kelp DAO, is one of them. 

It is supposed to represent real staked ETH held somewhere else, tracked by a bridge that tells Aave how much of it exists and what it is worth.

That bridge is the weak link. 

Aave trusts it. Aave has to trust it, because Aave does not control it.

On April 18, someone broke the bridge.

An attacker was able to mint 116,500 rsETH out of thin air. 

About $292M worth, roughly 18% of rsETH's entire circulating supply, conjured from nothing. No actual ETH backed any of it.

Selling the fake tokens was not an option. 

rsETH liquidity is thin, and dumping $292M of it would have crashed the price before the attacker could cash out. 

So they did something smarter. 

They deposited the fake rsETH on Aave V3 as collateral and borrowed real WETH against it. 

By the time Kelp's multisig froze the bridge 46 minutes later, the money was already gone. And Aave was holding the bag.

The damage landed in two waves.

First, the direct loss. 

Estimates for the bad debt run from $177M to $236M, depending on liquidation mechanics and recovery paths.

Then came the run. 

Over the next 48 hours, Aave's TVL collapsed from $26.4B to roughly $16.8B. 

A drop of more than $9B, driven almost entirely by depositors sprinting for the exit. 

MEXC pulled about $431M. Abraxas Capital pulled $392M. A whale linked to Nonco withdrew over $400M. Justin Sun reportedly moved more than 65,000 ETH. 

The WETH pool on Aave V3 hit 100% utilization, meaning suppliers could not redeem. 

USDT and USDC pools followed. 

AAVE dropped 18-20% in a single day.

None of this is good. And it is still TBD how this whole situation will be resolved. 

But before you write off the protocol, three things are worth pulling apart:

1. Aave's contracts were not exploited

The attacker did not find a bug in Aave. They found a bug in Kelp's bridge, then used Aave as the exit ramp. 

Aave simply accepted a collateral asset whose backing silently disappeared on infrastructure it does not control. That is a risk-parameter failure, not a smart-contract failure. 

The distinction matters, especially for how Umbrella ultimately pays out.

2. Umbrella just got its first real-world test

Umbrella is Aave's insurance backstop, introduced in late 2025 to replace the legacy Safety Module. 

Within hours of the exploit, Aave said Umbrella would cover the deficit. 

Within 24 hours, the language softened to "exploring paths to offset the loss." 

Because Umbrella cannot fully plug the gap, stkAAVE holders may be slashed, and WETH suppliers may take a haircut. 

This is the live fire test every DeFi insurance design has been waiting for, and the verdict is still forming.

3. The parameters that made this possible were set by a risk team on its way out

The listing parameters that let an attacker pull $200M of real ETH out of the system using a single forged bridge message were owned by Chaos Labs. 

The same Chaos Labs that had announced its exit twelve days earlier. Draw your own conclusions. 🤔

The silver lining, if you can call it that, is architectural. 

Aave V4 was built for exactly this problem. 

The Spoke model isolates markets the same way Morpho does, which means an rsETH-style event inside a V4 Spoke would be contained by design, not by luck. 

The protocol that just got hit is the one V4 was built to replace.

Which leaves every AAVE holder reading this with one question.

Sell, hold, or double down?

HOW I’M PLAYING IT