Marc Zeller comes out swinging against the Horizon RWA temperature check proposal

Marc Zeller, founder of the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) and a leading Aave governance delegate, publicly opposed Aave Labs’ “Temp Check” proposal to license an Aave v3 instance for Horizon’s real-world asset (RWA) product aimed at institutions. The Horizon proposal envisions an Aave-licensed, institution-focused money market that would let approved users borrow stablecoins such as USDC and GHO against tokenized money market funds and other RWA collateral, with a profit‑sharing model where Horizon pays a declining revenue share plus potential token allocation to the Aave DAO over time. Horizon is positioned by Aave Labs as a way to capture institutional RWA growth and make Aave infrastructure the base layer for compliant, permissioned DeFi activity. In his forum response, Zeller argued that the current Horizon Temp Check “is not even worth discussing in its current form,” and said the ACI will not support it. He criticized the proposal for effectively introducing a separate, Aave-licensed environment while Aave already has a single ecosystem token (AAVE), and framed the thread as a de facto relaunch of the previously sunsetted institutional product Aave Arc rather than a clearly structured, community-aligned initiative. Zeller urged broader DAO participation and called for a more rigorous process, including clearer alignment of incentives with existing tokenholders and sharper separation of concerns between public-good protocol development and private, profit-seeking products built on Aave infrastructure. His intervention highlights ongoing governance tensions in Aave around licensing, revenue sharing, and how far the DAO should go in endorsing or economically backing vertically integrated, institution‑oriented products like Horizon.

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

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