Aave to wind down Family wallet, fold Avara brand into Aave Labs

Aave will shut down its Family wallet, retire the Avara brand, and consolidate under Aave Labs after governance strife, SEC closure, and MiCA authorization.

Aave (AAVE) founder Stani Kulechov announced the decentralized finance protocol will wind down its Family iOS wallet over the coming year and retire the Avara umbrella brand as the company consolidates operations under Aave Labs, according to a company statement.

The protocol will cease onboarding new users to Family from April 1, with existing customers able to access the application until April 2027 before transitioning to Aave’s infrastructure, the announcement stated.

Kulechov said the decision reflects lessons learned from attempting to onboard users through different product approaches. The company determined that mainstream adoption would occur through focused financial applications such as savings and lending rather than general-purpose wallet experiences, according to the statement.

The shift follows Aave’s transfer of stewardship of its Lens Protocol social network to Mask Network weeks earlier, completing a narrowing of focus after years of ecosystem expansion.

The Family team, acquired by Avara in 2023, contributed work across multiple Aave products including Aave Pro, the mobile application, and the protocol’s brand identity, according to the company.

Family Accounts technology will continue to power authentication and embedded wallet functionality across Aave’s product suite rather than operate as a standalone consumer application, the announcement stated. Existing Family users will maintain control of funds through accounts.aave.com using their credentials, though app functionality will gradually be limited to account access and withdrawals only.

The consolidation follows a six-month period during which Aave faced governance disputes and internal tensions over asset ownership.

In December, Kulechov purchased tokens shortly before a controversial vote, prompting critics to allege the move was designed to boost voting power. Community tensions escalated when Aave Labs pushed a proposal to vote regarding brand asset ownership without notifying its author, according to forum discussions.

Ernesto Boado of BGD Labs said the move was not in keeping with prior forum discussion and accused Aave Labs of breaking trust with the community, according to public statements.

Contributors raised concerns that certain product decisions, including replacing Paraswap with CowSwap integration, redirected estimated annual fee revenue away from the DAO treasury toward private entities. Marc Zeller of the Aave Chan Initiative argued the DAO had paid for brand assets “four times” through the original LEND token sale, dilution, liquidity mining programs, and service provider fees, according to forum posts.

Snapshot data showed the top three wallets controlled more than 58% of voting power, with the largest wallet holding over 27%, according to blockchain records.

The Securities and Exchange Commission concluded its investigation of Aave without recommending enforcement action in December, ending nearly four years of uncertainty. The protocol also obtained MiCA authorization in Europe, according to regulatory filings.

The Lens Protocol handover to Mask Network in January represented another component of Aave’s consolidation strategy, with functions such as intellectual property and chain infrastructure moving to Mask while Lens remains permissionless infrastructure.

Aave remains one of the largest DeFi platforms by total value locked, according to industry data.

Kulechov, who was born in Estonia and raised in Finland, is preparing to launch Aave V4, according to the company. All current and future products will operate under the Aave Labs brand as the company focuses resources on building brand awareness and introducing DeFi to new users globally, the statement said.