What's Driving Token Prices? March 4, 2026

AAVE (-3.7%) - The continued power struggle within Aave’s governance between the Labs division and the DAO might finally be at an end this week. Aave, the largest money market protocol, has been plagued by governance issues in recent months as the protocol’s DAO has unsuccessfully attempted to claw back IP assets and revenue owned by the Labs division. The showdown came to a head when the Labs team published a proposal a few weeks ago titled “Aave Will Win” requesting a $51M annual budget for the Labs team while promising to direct 100% of future revenue to the DAO. Members of the DAO opposed this proposal for many reasons, most importantly, the extremely large budget request, but the proposal was sent to an initial vote anyway. The vote ended on Saturday, with the proposal passing after many wallets allegedly controlled by the Labs entity voted it through. In response, ACI, one of the largest AAVE tokenholder delegates and DAO contributors, announced yesterday that it was terminating its contract with the DAO, citing poor governance. ACI joins BGD, another DAO service provider that also terminated its contract two weeks ago over Aave’s governance struggles. The infighting has not been beneficial for the AAVE token, which has slid 13% in recent weeks, but the resignation of ACI may signal a new chapter for Aave to move forward with one “leader” within the protocol.
FLUID (+7%) - This past week, Fluid, one of the largest lending protocols, published a governance proposal to transfer all IP to the protocol’s foundation. The foundation, which was recently established by developers for Fluid, would also earn a $250K monthly grant from the DAO as a service provider. The proposal seeks to preemptively get ahead of a DAO standoff between Instadapp (the creator of Fluid) and the Fluid DAO by creating a foundation and transferring assets. The same standoff is occurring right now in competitor Aave’s governance forum. Fluid also announced a partnership with Venus (BNB Chain’s largest money market protocol) to create Venus Flux. Venus Flux, which is also based on BNB Chain, introduces features from Fluid, including lend/borrow, 1-click leverage, swap, smart debt, and smart collateral. Fluid previously spun up something similar for Jupiter on Solana, essentially providing them with the backend infrastructure for its lending product.
META (+9.4%) - Token launchpad MetaDAO announced the launch of Futardio, a permissionless launchpad, this week, while also handling its first major liquidation case. MetaDAO is a futarchy-based launchpad that curates early-stage token launches, pioneering a governance system to keep teams accountable while building in the open. Teams can raise capital through early-stage token offerings, often referred to as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), but must adhere to strict roadmaps and milestones in order to collect their funding. The design came after many projects would raise funds online and “rug” their community by walking away with the money or never delivering a product. MetaDAO ICOs have become increasingly popular for early-stage teams, especially as MetaDAO curates these launches. Futardio, however, was built as a permissionless version of MetaDAO, allowing teams to raise capital more freely without MetaDAO’s curation process. More recently, MetaDAO’s design was put to the test following the Ranger ICO in early January. Ranger is accused of materially misrepresenting its revenues and traction in its early investor presentation and has seen significant activity drop off on its product following the ICO. A liquidation proposal was posted to MetaDAO’s forum, recommending liquidating the ICO proceeds and returning them to tokenholders. The proposal won’t close for another day, but so far appears it will pass.

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