Aave Rejects Kraken’s $385M Stake Offer at 70% Discount

Published by James Harris on June 26, 2026June 26, 2026

Kraken’s parent company reportedly sought to buy a 15% equity stake in Aave Labs for $385 million, implying a valuation at roughly 30% of the protocol’s fully diluted token figure. Aave founder Stani Kulechov rejected the framing publicly, calling a 70% discount a non-starter.

The reported number matters because of what sits behind it. According to DefiLlama data, Aave carried a fully diluted valuation of approximately $1.32 billion at the time, with AAVE trading near $82.49. Kulechov cited $134 million in annualized protocol revenue as justification for refusing discounted terms, and previewed Aavenomics 3.0, which includes an automated buyback mechanism intended to return value to token holders through protocol economics rather than secondary sales. The structural distinction he drew is also worth holding onto: if Aave Labs sold tokens from its own allocation, the buyer would acquire exposure to AAVE without gaining any claim over the DAO or its revenue streams. That is a very different transaction from an acquisition in the traditional sense, and the conflation of the two is what Kulechov called inaccurate. Kraken already has a working relationship with the protocol through Ink, its incubated Layer 2 network, which launched Tydro as a white-label lending layer built on Aave’s infrastructure.

The timing is awkward. Aave’s governance has been visibly strained, with three major service providers, including Aave Chan Initiative, BGD Labs, and Chaos Labs, departing or announcing exits amid disputes over accountability and contributor treatment.

That internal fragmentation is the part the acquisition framing obscures. The Kelp DAO rsETH exploit in April exposed downstream collateral risk across Aave markets, and the Aave Will Win framework, which allocated $25 million in stablecoins and 75,000 AAVE tokens to Aave Labs, drew significant opposition inside the DAO, with ACI founder Marc Zeller casting 166,200 AAVE against it. A protocol navigating that kind of governance friction is a different asset from one with unified stakeholder alignment, regardless of revenue figures. AAVE has already shed significant ground from its recent highs, and the discount embedded in Kraken’s reported offer may reflect that instability as much as any negotiating posture.

What the episode clarifies is the gap between how DeFi protocols are valued on-chain and how traditional finance buyers actually price governance risk and legal ambiguity when structuring deals. Centralized exchanges seeking DeFi exposure through acquisition will keep running into this mismatch: token valuations carry no clean equity analog, DAO control is diffuse by design, and any deal that looks like a bargain to a TradFi buyer will look like capitulation to token holders. Kulechov’s public rebuttal and the buyback preview are aimed directly at that audience.

The full details of Aavenomics 3.0 and its buyback mechanism have not yet been released, so whether the proposal can consolidate token holder confidence while governance disputes remain unresolved is an open question with a timeline that Aave itself has not yet defined.