BGD Labs Ends Long-Term Partnership with Aave DAO

After nearly four years of collaboration, BGD Labs, the primary technical service provider of the Aave DAO, will conclude its engagement with the protocol on April 1, 2026. As per their current Phase 6 agreement, which was approved in October 2025, BGD's involvement in development and security coordination will come to an end.

Since 2022, BGD Labs has been instrumental in upgrading and maintaining key versions of the Aave lending protocol, including its governance stack. Under various time-boxed 'phase' contracts, the company led work on Aave v3 upgrades, network deployments, governance tooling, emergency systems, and bug-fixing for older versions.

BGD's contributions to Aave have been extensive, with notable highlights including deprecating Aave v1, maintaining v2 and v3, designing 'Liquid eModes,' and coordinating audits and incident responses. The team has also developed and maintained interfaces such as the Aave Governance v3 front end, the a.DI monitoring dashboard, and automation tools like Aave Robot and Seatbelt used to monitor proposals.

Following its departure from Aave, BGD Labs will focus on independent products rather than seeking another technical services mandate. This decision comes after the company expressed concerns over governance alignment and control of Aave brand assets in a late-2025 token alignment proposal. The discussion surrounding this proposal highlighted deeper conflicts regarding how much control service providers should have over large DeFi protocols.