Aave DAO’s “State of the Union” recalls late 2022 chaos—FTX, Celsius & 3AC collapsed, Anchor wiped $6B, stETH depegged, TVL sank to $5B, and treasury raiders drained funds. With V3 struggling, many declared DeFi dead—but ACI launched to “Make Aave Great Again.”

Aave’s governance forum post frames the protocol’s recent progress against the backdrop of late-2022 DeFi turmoil, when the collapses of FTX, Celsius, and Three Arrows Capital, along with Terra’s Anchor crisis and the stETH depeg, sharply reduced confidence across crypto lending markets. The post says Aave now sits on “comfortable ground,” pointing to stronger TVL, revenue, market share, and borrowing volume as evidence that the DAO has moved beyond that period of stress. The significance of the story is that it marks a shift in Aave’s narrative from survival to consolidation and governance ambition. Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), the governance group closely associated with Aave, is using the “State of the Union” framing to argue that Aave has become the dominant lending protocol in DeFi and should push harder on strategy and ecosystem control, after a period in which many in the market declared DeFi dead.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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