- Unchained Daily
- Posts
- Governance Crisis Hits Aave as Key Contributors Exit
Governance Crisis Hits Aave as Key Contributors Exit
Plus: 🏛️ Trump pushes Congress on crypto market rules, ⚖️ US regulators eye crypto perpetual futures framework
Juan Aranovich
March 04, 2026
Hi! In today’s edition:
🏛️ Aave governance rift deepens as key contributor prepares exit
🇺🇸 Trump pushes Congress to pass crypto market structure rules
⚖️ Regulators move toward legalizing crypto perpetual futures in the US
🤖 Could AI companies eventually be valued like utilities?
🎙️ Bits + Bips examines war in Iran and the ripple effects for bitcoin and markets
Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Fuse Energy!
Fuse Energy hits a $5B valuation on the cusp of launching their $ENERGY token
Fuse Energy is a $400M ARR utility powering 250,000+ homes, and has recently announced a $70M series B at a blockbuster $5B valuation.
The Energy Network is set to launch soon. It is a new digital layer engineered to scale our grids and save billions in costs.
And now, it’s just building momentum:
$170M raised to date
$5B valuation
Beta live on Solana
Landmark SEC no-action letter secured
Planning listings soon
A new foundation for the grid is coming.
Governance Rift Deepens at Aave as Key Contributor Plans Exit
Tensions inside the Aave DAO are escalating after the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), a major governance delegate led by Marc Zeller, said it will wind down operations and leave the ecosystem by July. The group will spend the next four months transferring infrastructure and responsibilities before stepping away.
The decision comes shortly after BGD Labs, a core technical contributor to the protocol, announced it will stop working on Aave when its contract expires in April. Zeller said BGD’s departure helped trigger the move.
The dispute traces back to a December controversy over fees from a CoW Swap integration that were routed to Aave Labs rather than the DAO treasury, sparking debate about transparency and control. The disagreement later widened into a broader governance fight after Aave Labs proposed a $51 million funding package tied to development of Aave v4.
Zeller has argued that voting power linked to Aave Labs was decisive in passing the proposal. He warned that the current system allows a single entity to push through major budget decisions, raising questions about how decentralized the DAO’s governance really is.
Today: Uneasy Money
Another core contributor is leaving Aave after a contentious governance vote, raising fresh questions about who really controls the protocol.
Meanwhile, NEAR is betting that private execution will attract institutional traders, and prediction markets are facing scrutiny after suspiciously timed bets around geopolitical events. On Uneasy Money, we unpack how information advantages are shaping crypto markets.
Trump Presses Congress on Crypto Rules Amid Banking Fight
President Donald Trump is ramping up pressure on Congress to pass the Clarity Act, a bill meant to define how U.S. regulators oversee the crypto market. In a post on Truth Social, Trump accused banks of trying to undermine the administration’s crypto agenda and warned they should not hold the legislation “hostage.”
The dispute centers on stablecoin yield. Crypto companies want the ability to offer rewards to users who hold stablecoins, arguing it allows Americans to earn more on their money. Banks oppose the idea, saying yield bearing stablecoins could pull deposits away from the traditional financial system.
Trump defended the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin framework he signed last year, and said the next step is finalizing broader market structure rules through the Clarity Act. “The U.S. needs to get Market Structure done ASAP,” he wrote, warning that delays could push innovation overseas.
The bill has stalled in the Senate as lawmakers debate the role of regulators such as the SEC and CFTC. Behind the scenes, the White House has been hosting talks between banks and crypto firms as negotiators try to settle the yield dispute.
U.S. Moves Toward Crypto Perpetual Futures and Prediction Market Rules
U.S. regulators are preparing a major shift in crypto market structure. CFTC Chair Mike Selig said the agency plans to clear the path for crypto perpetual futures in the coming weeks, a move that could bring one of the industry’s most popular derivatives products onshore.
Perpetual futures dominate trading on offshore crypto exchanges because the U.S. has long lacked a regulatory framework for them. Selig said the goal is to introduce “true professional futures” markets in the U.S., reversing years of policy that pushed liquidity overseas. The effort is part of “Project Crypto,” a joint initiative with the Securities and Exchange Commission aimed at coordinating digital asset policy.
The CFTC is also turning its attention to prediction markets, another rapidly growing corner of the crypto ecosystem. Selig said the agency plans to issue guidance soon and begin a formal rulemaking process that will define which event contracts can be listed on regulated platforms.
The push comes as states such as Nevada and Tennessee challenge prediction market operators in court, arguing some contracts resemble gambling. The CFTC disagrees and maintains that event contracts fall under its federal jurisdiction.
Selig said the agency will set clear standards for evaluating these markets, signaling a broader attempt to bring both crypto derivatives and prediction platforms into a defined regulatory framework.
Could AI Companies End Up Being Valued Like Utilities?
Nvidia's most recent earnings landed with the usual fanfare: record quarterly data center revenue of $62.3 billion, up 75% from the year prior, and another signal that markets believe AI infrastructure is among the most valuable businesses in history.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been out on podcasts like Dwarkesh making his own version of that case, describing what he sees as a realistic path to $1 trillion in annual revenue for the company he leads — which entails not overspending before its revenue grows to meet the expense.
“It’s hard to predict,” he said on the popular AI podcast. “We could be profitable in 2026 if the revenue grows fast enough. And then if we overestimate or underestimate for next year, that could swing wildly.”
But what if the ultimate end game is one in which revenues and margins dwindle as AI becomes commoditized — and faster than one would think for an emerging tech?
Reframing AI Valuations
Ram Ahluwalia, co-host of Bits + Bips, put it this way. "Are water companies highly valued?" he asked in a recent episode. "We all need water. Does anyone know the name of their local water company? Intelligence will be a utility on demand at low cost serviced competitively."
Electricity was transformative when it arrived. So was the telephone. Both eventually became infrastructure, competed down to commodity pricing, indispensable but invisible. Ahluwalia's argument is that AI intelligence, the ability to answer questions, write code, and analyze data on demand, could follow the same arc.
The panic about DeepSeek in early 2025 exemplifies how fragile the economics of AI development is right now. The Chinese hedge fund wowed the world with a model that was produced for $5.6 million — a tiny fraction of the cost of the large language models produced by the likes of OpenAI for billions of dollars.
Factors to Weigh
The evidence for that outcome is already accumulating. Open source AI models, widely available through platforms like Hugging Face, which is focused on making AI more accessible using open source tools and hasn’t recently raised venture capital, currently run at roughly a tenth of the cost of the leading proprietary models.
The company’s head of monetization Jeff Boudier recently told Observer, “We’re not famous for making money.”
The performance gap is closing too. The best open source options now sit about a year behind the frontier, and that distance has been shrinking steadily.
That trajectory makes nearly trillion-dollar AI valuations harder to hold with confidence. The companies building frontier models may be doing something genuinely important. But important and high-margin are not the same thing. Utilities are important. Their profit margins, and their stock multiples (many of which are in the 20s), tell a very different story.
In fact, the sustainability of the valuations may be tested soon, with Thinking Machines, another AI startup founded by a former chief technology officer of OpenAI, experiencing internal turmoil, defections, and failed deal talks.
“Wait till Thinking Machines blows up,” said Ahluwalia. “You're not supposed to get billion dollar valuations on — not even a PowerPoint — just because you were around the OpenAI hoop. We're going to look back at this and say, ‘What craziness was done in Silicon Valley?’”
And if that’s the case, we may know by then whether AI model companies followed the Con Edison path or continued on the rocketship trajectory.
How the War in Iran Has Shuffled the Deck for Bitcoin, AI and China: Bits + Bips
Over the weekend, US and Israeli forces conducted coordinated strikes on Iran under an operation called Epic Fury, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and triggering retaliatory missile attacks across the Gulf region.
Markets absorbed the shock in ways that surprised almost everyone: bitcoin briefly dropped and recovered to $70,000, gold touched $5,400, oil surged, and the VIX held in the low 20s while equities finished roughly flat.
In this episode of Bits + Bips, Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Chris Perkins discuss whether the market is correctly pricing this as a contained regional conflict, or is something larger being missed? What does crypto's stability in a weekend war say about its role as an asset class? And with the Clarity Bill stalling again over stablecoin yield, and Anthropic handing the Pentagon to OpenAI, is the window for principled positioning in both crypto and AI closing faster than anyone admits?
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Podcast Addict,Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Sponsored
We all know the mantra: Not your keys, not your coins. But managing self-custody while trying to access leverage is a headache.
Figure bridges this gap for their Crypto Backed Loans with decentralized MPC custody. Your assets sit in a segregated wallet where you retain ownership—no opaque "commingled funds" risks here.
They are also tackling the biggest anxiety in lending: flash crashes. Their Liquidation Protection for BTC and ETH specifically protects you from getting wiped out during large price drops.
You get the best of both worlds:
Safety: Institutional-grade MPC custody.
Access: Borrow at just 8.91% on Crypto Backed Loans.
Yield: Earn up to 9% APY on cash, backed by real-world assets (HELOCs) with Democratized Prime.
Sleep better knowing your assets (and your upside) are protected.
📈⚡ Bitcoin climbed above $71,000 with a 6% daily surge, leading gains across major cryptocurrencies even as tensions in the Middle East disrupted oil supplies, with analysts noting the asset has held support near $65,000 and is increasingly behaving like a high-risk alternative safe-haven during geopolitical stress.
☢️📉 Polymarket removed its nuclear-detonation betting markets after public backlash and concerns that traders could profit from insider knowledge of military actions during the ongoing Iran-related conflict.
🏦 JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon argued that yield-paying stablecoins should face the same rules as bank deposits, warning that companies offering interest-like rewards on token balances risk creating a parallel banking system unless they follow bank requirements like capital buffers, liquidity rules and deposit insurance.
🛡️ Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin urged developers to build “sanctuary technologies” — open systems designed to protect privacy and autonomy — rather than imitate big tech companies like Apple or Google, framing Ethereum as digital infrastructure meant to limit centralized control over online life.
💳 Visa and Bridge — a stablecoin infrastructure firm owned by payments giant Stripe — are expanding crypto-linked debit cards from 18 to more than 100 countries, allowing users of wallets like MetaMask and Phantom to spend stablecoins through the traditional Visa payment network.
📈 Abu Dhabi regulators approved Binance’s platform to trade tokenized stocks created by Ondo Finance, a blockchain firm that converts real equities into digital versions, enabling institutions in the UAE to access blockchain-based shares of companies like Apple, Tesla and Nvidia.
