Top Aave risk manager Chaos Labs exits amid governance dispute

Chaos Labs is stepping down as Aave’s official risk manager after over three years, marking the latest major Aave contributor to walk away from the largest onchain lending platform following a major governance upheaval. 

“This decision was not made in haste,” Chaos Labs founder Omer Goldberg wrote on X on Monday. “However, we are leaving because the engagement no longer reflects how we believe risk should be managed,” Goldberg said. 

Chaos is a significant Aave vendor, having priced every loan initiated on Aave since 2022 and managed risk across all Aave V2 and V3 markets and networks, Goldberg said. 

Goldberg pointed to three key reasons for walking away from Aave, including a lack of profitability, the recent departure of core contributors BGD Labs and Aave Chan Initiative, and, perhaps most significantly, a fundamental misalignment with Aave Labs on how risk should be managed as Aave’s scope is set to widen significantly with the launch of Aave V4. 

Aave V4 still fresh

The move comes just a week after Aave officially rolled out V4, which represents a significant overhaul of the platform.

By introducing a new hub-and-spoke liquidity system, Aave is poised to expand into a range of new markets and use cases, Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov previously told The Block. 

While Kulechov has presented V4 as a significant opportunity to bring Aave into the real world, Goldberg noted that — at least in the short term — the upgrade presents significant risks. This is compounded by the fact that V3 will continue to require support “until V4 fully absorbs V3’s markets and liquidity,” a process that Kulechove has previously called to expedite. 

“History suggests these transitions take months and even years,” Goldberg said. “The workload during the transition doesn’t halve. It doubles.” This is significant given that Chaos represents the “last remaining technical contributor,” now that BGD and ACI are walking away from the project, meaning its workload was set to increase. 

“Taking on something new responsibly requires new infrastructure, new tooling, new simulations, and the full operational burden of going from zero to one again on a codebase that has not yet been battle-tested,” Goldberg said. “That is a materially larger scope than V3, and that expansion is core to our calculus.” 

Finances don’t Aave up

According to Goldberg, Chaos Labs had been operating at a loss for the past three years. 

Aave Labs reportedly offered an increased budget of $5 million to retain Chaos Labs and close its budget gap. Chaos’ budget was $3 million in 2025, and its estimated minimum needs to oversee V3 and V4 were $8 million, representing 5.6% of Aave’s protocol revenue. This does not include other operational and legal risks, which are more difficult to price, Goldberg said.

“But even if the economics were resolved, the misalignment on how risk should be prioritized and managed at Aave would remain. And that is not something a budget increase alone can fix,” Goldberg said. 

As part of his recent “Aave Will Win” proposal, Kulechov suggested converting Aave Labs into a DAO subsidiary. The proposal was meant to address a heated governance debate sparked by Aave Labs’ unilateral decision to redirect a DAO revenue stream to a corporate wallet, though many contributors were unsatisfied. 

ACI and BGD Labs both announced they would not renew their contracted work for Aave, with ACI Marc Zeller specifically noting Aave Labs’ control over the governance token supply.

In his post, Goldberg also noted that “Aave Labs recently passed a proposal for $50 million in self-funding.”

Under the Aave Will Win plan, Aave Labs would direct all protocol revenue to the Aave DAO and shift its Aave-related IP to a DAO-controlled entity. 

Aave is the largest onchain lending platform, and one of the few crypto protocols that is consistently profitable. In addition to releasing the highly flexible V4, Aave Labs is also developing the Aave App, which will offer a high-yield savings feature (with interest rates of up to 9%), meant to capture new retail users.

“To be clear: the DAO has every right to decide what it values and what it wants to pay for. I take no issue with that. My job is simply to decide whether the terms work for us. In this case, they don’t,” Goldberg said. 

“Despite not agreeing on the path forward, I believe Aave Labs is doing what it thinks is in Aave’s best interest.”

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