Payward-affiliated fund buys AAVE tokens on secondary market

A fund affiliated with Kraken's parent company Payward has acquired an undisclosed amount of AAVE tokens through secondary-market purchases, Payward announced Thursday. The investment came from Digital Asset Special Investments I, LP, alongside its clients, and the company left the door open to further AAVE purchases. Payward did not disclose financial terms.

The deal settles, at least partly, a negotiation that played out in public earlier this year. In June, CoinDesk reported that Payward was in talks to buy a 15% stake in Aave at a $385 million valuation — roughly a 70% discount to the protocol's actual value at the time. Aave founder Stani Kulechov publicly pushed back on the reported terms. He did, however, acknowledge that investors had discussed buying portions of Aave Labs' AAVE allocation through partnership structures.

Who said what about the deal?

Gurpreet Oberoi, vice president of Payward Asset Management and Institutional, framed the purchase as a long-horizon position. "This investment reflects our long-term conviction in onchain credit markets and DeFi, as well as growing demand from our clients for exposure to the infrastructure shaping the future of finance," Oberoi said in a separate announcement from Aave.

Kulechov, for his part, cast the arrangement as a distribution play rather than a discounted token sale. "Working with Payward is a strategic step toward bringing Aave to the next wave of retail and institutional users," he said in the same announcement.

What does the token actually convey?

AAVE tokens carry governance rights over the protocol and its treasury. Under the "Aave Will Win" framework approved in April, revenue generated by Aave-branded products flows into the DAO treasury, which token holders ultimately direct.

That structure gives the Payward-affiliated fund a governance footprint proportional to its stake, though the undisclosed size of the purchase leaves the exact voting weight unclear. The secondary-market route also means the transaction moved existing tokens between holders rather than minting new supply or drawing directly on Aave Labs' allocation, as the June discussions had reportedly contemplated.

Why the structure matters

The contrast with the June episode is instructive. A direct purchase from Aave Labs at a steep discount would have transferred value from the protocol's ecosystem to a single buyer — the objection implicit in Kulechov's rejection of the CoinDesk report. Secondary purchases at market prices avoid that transfer entirely, while still delivering the governance exposure and strategic partnership both sides say they want.

For Payward, the deal extends a pattern of institutional positioning across DeFi infrastructure by the Kraken parent. The company signaled openness to additional AAVE purchases, which could gradually increase its governance share without further negotiations over discounted primary sales.

Whether follow-on buying materializes — and how the Aave DAO's treasury-allocation priorities evolve under the "Aave Will Win" framework — will show whether institutional secondary accumulation becomes a recurring channel for DeFi governance stakes.