A debate over revenue sharing has erupted between the Aave project management community and the main development company, Aave Labs.

The conflict arises from Aave Labs' recent decision to integrate CoW Swap as the main trading infrastructure on the Aave website. This change replaced ParaSwap, a previous service that provided referral fees to the Aave DAO treasury.

DAO members questioned the economic impact after the interface update.

Governance representatives stated that this change has resulted in the loss of approximately 200,000 USD in income each week. If calculated annually, this loss is estimated to be around 10 million USD, pulling the value of the token away from retail investors.

Marc Zeller, founder of the Aave Chan Initiative, criticized this decision, calling it a move towards the 'quiet privatization' of brand assets.

Zeller believes that Aave Labs unilaterally changed the economic agreement without consulting the DAO, the entity responsible for managing the core smart contracts.

'Aave Labs, for its own profit, has redirected Aave users' transactions to a competing platform. This is unacceptable. With this integration, Aave lost two sources of revenue that are hard to recover,' he wrote.

Zeller warned that this lack of transparency makes people concerned about how future upgrades will be implemented.

He also emphasized the upcoming V4 upgrade and questioned whether other auxiliary features could also be 'isolated' from the DAO.

'We need to look at the entire picture to determine whether Aave Labs has violated its fiduciary duty to Aave DAO and AAVE token holders, and what we should expect from V4 in the future,' Zeller concluded.

Aave Labs defended its decisions.

In a detailed response, Stani Kulechov, the founder and CEO of Aave Labs, defended this integration decision and denied that the lost revenue was stolen income.

Kulechov stated that the fee from ParaSwap was previously just a 'voluntary excess revenue', not a mandatory fee from the protocol.

'That has never been a fixed fee, just a surplus we sent as a gift to the DAO,' he emphasized.

He also affirmed the clear distinction between the Aave protocol – decentralized smart contracts managed by the DAO and the website interface. According to him, this interface is a private product developed and maintained by Aave Labs.

Kulechov stated that Aave Labs is responsible for the technical and security costs of the website. He also mentioned that the DAO does not financially support ongoing product development costs.

Therefore, the company believes that generating revenue from the interface is reasonable to ensure long-term service sustainability.

'The fact that Aave Labs profits from its product is perfectly normal, especially since it does not affect the structures of the protocol,' he added.

This development company also reiterated Kulechov's viewpoint while acknowledging that it had not fully informed about the recent change.

This entity stated that they switched to CoW Swap to provide better trading prices along with user protection against MEV (maximum extractable value), not to increase revenue.