LEND, the DeFi darling up 5,000% in 2020, is about to undergo a critical upgrade
Aave has quickly become a flagship product in Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem. The decentralized money-market, where users can trustlessly borrow and lend crypto-assets like stablecoins, currently has over $1 billion worth of value locked in its contracts. Per DeFi Pulse, it is the third-biggest Ethereum protocol by total locked value.
While a flagship product in decentralized finance, the protocol is not entirely decentralized.
Governance of the protocol, meaning the direction it moves in, has largely been dictated by the organization behind the deployment of the protocol. Of course, users could voice their opinions online if they wanted something change, but there has been no formal governance structure to allow retail users to participate.
This is changing, though, with the introduction of “Aavenomics,” where the protocol’s native Ethereum-based token, LEND, will be swapped for a new token called AAVE that will help govern the protocol.