Talks between Kraken’s parent company, Payward, and Aave have triggered a debate over how to value a DeFi protocol compared to a traditional company. CoinDesk reported that Payward was negotiating for a 15% stake in Aave at a reported valuation of $385 million, involving 35,000 ether, worth roughly $55 million at current prices, plus 250,000 Aave tokens and company equity. But Aave founder Stani Kulechov pushed back, saying there was “no way” Aave would sell Aave at a 70% discount.
He argued that 100% of Aave Protocol and GHO revenue goes to the Aave token ecosystem, not to the company itself. That is the heart of the dispute. In Aave’s structure, the protocol’s economics increasingly sit with token holders, while Aave Group represents the company layer around the project. That makes a traditional equity valuation much harder to map onto the protocol itself.
The launch of Aavenomics 3.0, which activated automated Aave buybacks, pushes even more attention onto the gap between company value and token value. Until the structure of any deal is made clear, this remains a core tension for DeFi: when a centralized buyer shows up, what exactly are they buying?