Chaos Labs, the risk management firm that has “priced every loan on Aave since November 2022,” announced Monday that it is proactively terminating its engagement with DeFi’s largest lending protocol, citing a fundamental disagreement over how risk should be managed.

The departure makes Chaos the third core contributor to exit Aave’s operations in recent months, following BGD Labs’ exit on April 1 and the Aave-Chan Initiative’s wind-down announcement in early March.

In a forum post, Chaos Labs CEO Omer Goldberg named all three alongside TokenLogic as the contributor group whose “people, technology, and operational experience” produced Aave’s track record, and noted that Chaos is now the last remaining technical contributor from that cohort.

Budget Gap

Goldberg pointed to three factors behind the decision: the departure of other core contributors, which increased the operational burden; the expanded scope and legal liability introduced by Aave V4’s new architecture; and the fact that the firm has operated its Aave engagement at a loss for three years.

Aave Labs offered to raise the budget to $5 million to retain Chaos, but the firm estimated that a minimum of $8 million was necessary to cover V3, V4, and its institutional go-to-market work. Goldberg framed the figure as still below the 6-10% that traditional banks allocate to compliance and risk infrastructure.

“Budgets don’t reshape the threat landscape. The cost is the cost,” Goldberg wrote.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov responded on X, thanking Chaos for its contributions but pushing back on several elements of the firm’s account.

Kulechov said that in recent weeks, Chaos had been “exploring winding down its risk consultancy services business” and had already begun winding down agreements with other protocols. He said Aave Labs was “generally supportive” of doubling Chaos’ budget to $5 million but was not willing to approve $8 million without a separate addendum tied to demonstrated workload.

More pointedly, Kulechov said the disagreement extended beyond compensation. He said Aave Labs did not support other elements of Chaos’ proposal, including making Chaos the sole risk manager, replacing Chainlink with Chaos Labs’ own price oracles on all new deployments, and adopting Chaos Labs’ vaults — which he said are not yet audited — as the default for all B2B integrations.

“While we do not see issues with these Chaos products or their future viability, we strongly believe that, given the scale of the Aave protocol, it should maintain at least a two-layer risk management model and vendor lock-in free vaults,” Kulechov wrote.

He also disputed the characterization of V4’s risk implications, saying Aave Labs held multiple risk calls with Chaos employees before V4 went live, and that the feedback received during those sessions “does not align with the concerns expressed in their post.”

Deeper Misalignment

Beyond economics, Goldberg described a fundamental disagreement over how risk should be prioritized as Aave transitions to V4 — a protocol he characterized as entirely new, with a different smart contract codebase, system architecture, and liquidation logic that shares only a name with V3.

The firm argued that its purpose-built Risk Oracle infrastructure, which streams hundreds of parameter updates monthly across Aave’s markets, cannot simply be ported to a new architecture. When the architecture is rewritten from scratch, Goldberg said, the risk infrastructure must follow, requiring significant new investment in tooling, simulations, and operational capacity.

Chaos also raised concerns about legal exposure, noting there is no regulatory framework or safe harbor for DeFi risk managers and that liability remains undefined if something goes wrong.

Knowledge Drain

In a section titled “The Ship of Theseus,” Goldberg warned that the accumulated knowledge base behind Aave’s operation is being hollowed out.

“Core contributors who built and operated V3 have departed. Most of the accumulated operating knowledge that kept Aave running through three years of live markets has left with them,” he wrote.

He noted that migrating from V3 to V4 doesn’t halve the workload but doubles it, since both systems must be operated simultaneously during a transition that could take months or years.

He also highlighted that during the tenure of its current contributors, Aave grew from $5.2B to more than $26B in TVL, processed over $2B in liquidations, and facilitated more than $2.5T in cumulative deposit volume — all with zero material bad debt.

Governance Crisis Deepens

The departure caps a tumultuous stretch for Aave governance.

The dispute between the DAO and Aave Labs has been escalating since December, when a clash over fee distribution and tokenholder rights erupted on the governance forum.

That was followed by Aave Labs’ contentious “Aave Will Win” proposal requesting $51 million in development funding, which narrowly passed but exposed deep divisions among delegates.

Chaos Labs said it would follow up with a structured offboarding proposal to support continuity during the transition.

AAVE is trading near $96, up 5% in the past 24 hours amid a broader market rally, but down roughly 73% from its August 2025 high of $356.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.