Author: Techub Hot News Express
By Tia, Techub News
A recent Aave community proposal—approved overwhelmingly—removes USDS and DAI from the platform’s list of accepted collateral assets and increases the risk reserve ratio. While this technical adjustment to risk parameters may appear routine, it in fact unveils the harsh competitive logic of DeFi 2.0.
The Trigger: Imbalance Between Risk and Return
The Aave proposal document outlines two core arguments. First is the structural risk inherent in the Sky ecosystem. Post-transformation, Sky is no longer merely a stablecoin issuer—it has evolved into an “on-chain Federal Reserve,” deploying “internal credit lines” to SubDAOs such as Spark and Grove to execute cross-domain expansion. Aave expresses concern that, under this parent-subsidiary structure, SubDAOs could access capital at zero or near-zero cost, subsequently channeling funds into high-risk, high-return strategies that ultimately erode USDS’s stability foundation. Although Rune, Sky’s founder, publicly clarified that SubDAOs actually bear an interest cost of approximately 4.55%, and that core subsidiaries like Spark must prioritize allocating protocol revenue into risk reserves, Aave’s risk assessment evidently remains unconvinced.
The second rationale is more pragmatic: USDS’s utilization on the Aave platform has remained persistently low, delivering far less economic value than anticipated. Within DeFi protocols’ actuarial models, every collateral asset consumes risk exposure and liquidity resources; when returns fail to offset potential risks, rational actors opt for timely loss mitigation. Underlying this lies a deeper commercial logic—now that native lending protocols like Spark have matured, the Sky ecosystem is progressively internalizing lending activities. As a result, Aave’s marginal value as an external channel has effectively diminished to zero.
From Alliance to Rivalry: An Inevitable Identity Mismatch
To grasp the inevitability of this “breakup,” one must trace the evolution from MakerDAO to Sky. The original MakerDAO served purely as a stablecoin supplier, consistently channeling TVL to Aave—a classic complementary relationship. But post-transformation, Sky faces a critical question: Can growth at scale be sustained solely through the CDP model? The LUSD case serves as a cautionary tale—its immutable stability mechanism guarantees decentralization purity but has long stagnated in both application scope and market cap. Sky instead chose a more conventional financial expansion path: earning interest spreads by lending to SubDAOs, and executing comprehensive strategic positioning across lending, RWA, and other domains via a holding-company model.
This model’s success hinges on extremely stringent prerequisites: SubDAOs must capture returns exceeding the 4.55% benchmark interest rate. This dynamic inevitably transforms Sky from Aave’s friendly collaborator into a direct competitor. When Spark’s SLL (Spark Liquidity Layer) begins absorbing the collateralized lending demand previously served by Aave, the foundational basis of their former partnership begins to crumble. As industry commentary bluntly observes, “Maker forked Spark and stabbed Aave in the back”—while sharp, this remark precisely captures the essence of the underlying business-model conflict.
Rational Calculations from Three Perspectives
From Aave’s perspective, delisting USDS is a classic defensive move. While the protocol cannot conduct deep, transparent oversight of SubDAOs’ fund operations, it remains passively exposed to risk spillovers from them—an asymmetric vulnerability that is unacceptable under its risk management framework. Notably, Aave’s concurrently proposed multi-chain strategy optimization reveals its resource-allocation logic: chains generating less than $2 million in annual revenue will no longer receive deployments, whereas Ethereum mainnet alone yields an annual net interest spread of $142 million.
Sky’s expansion carries inevitable costs. Choosing growth means embracing complexity—risk contagion, long observed in traditional financial holding companies, is equally unavoidable in the onchain world. The only viable remedy is extreme transparency, enabling users and partners to independently assess the risk-return profile of each SubDAO. After all, once Sky proactively elevates USDS from a public infrastructure component to a competitive tool within its ecosystem, it must accept the outcome of partners voting with their feet.
For end users, the actual impact remains limited. Demand for USDS as collateral in Aave’s lending/borrowing markets was already thin, and Spark’s Savings Vault and SLL already provide fully functional alternatives. The real loss lies in narrowing choice—the early DeFi utopian ideal of “arbitrary composability” is giving way to moats built on pragmatic commercial interests.
On the Eve of the DeFi Civil War: Hierarchy Replaces Flatness
The significance of this incident lies in its declaration of the end of DeFi 1.0’s “composability honeymoon period.” As leading protocols complete their initial accumulation phase, vertical integration across the value chain becomes an instinctive strategic choice. The formerly open, permissionless, flat ecosystem inevitably evolves toward hierarchy and territorialization. Aave draws boundaries via governance votes; Sky erects ecosystem barriers through SubDAOs—both are fundamentally efforts to internalize externalities and associated risks.
A deeper question concerns the coordinating capacity of governance tokens. When protocol interests conflict, can cross-community governance votes truly transcend short-term博弈 (interest-driven bargaining)? The USDS delisting will not be an isolated case—it marks the opening salvo of a series of DeFi civil wars. Each protocol will face difficult trade-offs between open ethos and commercial sustainability, and users will ultimately realize: there is no eternal composability—only the eternal need to assess risk-return ratios.