Aave Founder Meme-Denies 70% Discount as Kraken Chats 15% Stake at $385M 🏦

Aave founder Stani Kulechov pushed back on a report that crypto exchange Kraken is negotiating to acquire a roughly 15% stake in the lending protocol at a $385 million valuation, rejecting the claim that any AAVE tokens involved would change hands at a steep discount. "there is NO WAY we'd sell AAVE at a 70% discount lol," he wrote, calling the framing of the report inaccurate. Kraken has not publicly confirmed the deal terms, which trace to anonymous sources. Kulechov said only that outside parties have discussed purchasing an AAVE allocation held by Aave Labs, the service provider that operates the protocol on behalf of the Aave DAO and does not take a share of protocol revenue.

The reported structure would see Kraken invest 35,000 ETH (~$55M) in exchange for 250,000 AAVE tokens ($20M) and the 15% common equity stake in Aave Group, a package valued at roughly $71 million. Talks come as Aave continues to recover from the April KelpDAO exploit, which created up to $230 million in bad debt after attackers borrowed against unbacked tokens and erased more than a third of deposits. Aave's smart contracts were never breached, and deposits sit near $12 billion today. The two firms already share a business tie after the Aave DAO voted 99.8% in 2025 to license its code to Kraken's Ink network, which runs a white-label lending market that shares revenue back to Aave.

Kulechov emphasized that 100% of Aave Protocol and GHO revenue flows to the $AAVE token under the Aave Will Win framework. He also pointed to Aavenomics 3.0, which would automate $AAVE buybacks and extend a discretionary program already cleared to repurchase up to $50 million of AAVE a year. $AAVE traded near $82, up almost 5% over 24 hours, with a market capitalization of roughly $1.24 billion against the reported $385 million equity valuation of Aave Group.

Standard Chartered turned openly bullish on $AAVE the same week, with Geoff Kendrick initiating coverage and a price target implying nearly 50 times upside by the end of the decade, which would put the token near $4,000 versus roughly $81 today. For parent Payward, the potential deal fits an acquisition run that already includes a $550 million agreement to buy derivatives venue Bitnomial, which carries rare US derivatives licenses, ahead of a planned public listing. Aave has scheduled a quarterly community call within weeks, where the status of the Kraken talks and the rollout of automated buybacks are expected to come into focus.