Overview
- Reports on Thursday said Kraken’s parent Payward is in talks to buy a roughly 15% interest in Aave Group using 35,000 ETH plus 250,000 AAVE, a package that would value Aave near $385 million and total about $71 million in funding.
- Aave founder Stani Kulechov pushed back publicly on the coverage by saying no AAVE would be sold at a roughly 70% discount and clarifying that the discussions involve Aave Labs’ token allocation rather than protocol revenues.
- The talks follow Aave’s recovery work after the April KelpDAO/rsETH bridge exploit that generated about $292 million in fake tokens, caused $190M–$230M of bad debt on Aave and triggered more than $8 billion in withdrawals.
- Aave is advancing governance and tokenomics changes, including the Aave Will Win revenue routing and a planned Aavenomics 3.0 automated buyback system, and the protocol has cited roughly $134 million in annualized revenue.
- Analysts are split on the outlook: Standard Chartered issued a bullish $3,500 AAVE 2030 target tied to large‑scale tokenized real‑world assets, while the founder’s denial and the deal’s valuation raise fresh questions about governance, asset allocation and market confidence.