Aave founder Stani Kulechov says AAVE isn't for sale 'at a 70% discount' following report of Payward bid

Aave founder Stani Kulechov pushed back against reports that Kraken parent firm Payward is in talks to buy a 15% stake in the protocol at a $385 million valuation, which would represent just 30% of the AAVE token's fully diluted valuation.

"First off, there is NO WAY we’d sell AAVE at a 70% discount lol," Kulechov said in an X post on Thursday.

CoinDesk reported those figures on Thursday, citing two unnamed sources.

Aave is the largest Ethereum-based decentralized lending protocol. Kulechov said it's generating $134 million in annualized revenue, which is currently directed toward the Aave DAO.

Notably, Kulechov did not outright deny that Aave Labs, the for-profit R&D firm that initially built the Aave protocol, could sell some of its accumulated (AAVE) tokens.

"Aave Labs owns an allocation of AAVE that multiple market participants have discussed purchasing, directly or indirectly, through deeper long-term partnerships," Kulechov said, noting, however, that CoinDesk's "article's framing is inaccurate."

Kraken and Aave have linked up in the past. Last year, for instance, Kraken’s Layer 2 Ink launched a white-label instance of Aave called Tydro to serve as the blockchain’s core lending infrastructure.

The rumors come amid a somewhat challenging period for Aave, which has seen its total value locked plummet following the Kelp DAO in April. While Aave wasn’t directly attacked, the KelpDAO bridge exploiter was able to leverage Aave to convert stolen rsETH into other assets.

Earlier this month, Aave released an updated risk framework to prevent situations like the KelpDAO attack.

Aave Labs also raised community ire last year after redirecting its website interface swap fees to itself instead of the DAO, leading to a significant governance challenge. Core Aave contributors ACI, Chaos Labs, and BGD Labs left the ecosystem, and proposals were published calling for the DAO to subsume Aave Labs’ intellectual property.

In response, Kulechov submitted his “Aave Will Win” (AWW) proposal, which passed with about 75% support in April 2026, that redirected 100% of protocol and Aave-branded product revenue to the DAO and AAVE token holders. In exchange, the DAO approved multi-year funding for Labs.

Aave released v4, including an updated hub-and-spoke model, in March.

"No protocol or product revenue goes to Aave Labs, which is a service provider to the DAO responsible for building and growing Aave," Kulechov said on Thursday. "We haven’t shared much on this yet, but the Aave team is designing Aavenomics 3.0, which includes a new automated and non-discretionary buyback mechanism. More on this later."

"Everyone at Aave Labs and Aave DAO works for $AAVE," he added.