Kraken parent Payward buys AAVE tokens on the open market, but will not say how many

Payward, the company that owns the Kraken exchange, said on Thursday 5 November that one of its affiliated funds, Digital Asset Special Investments I, blockchain that runs exactly as written when it is called, holding and moving funds according to its code, without an intermediary able to change the outcome.">smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, supplied by users, that a decentralized exchange uses to execute trades automatically at a price set by a formula.">LP, and that fund’s clients have bought AAVE, the governance token of the lending protocol Aave, on the secondary market. The Payward press release, datelined Cheyenne, Wyoming, gives no amount, no price and no number of tokens. It says Payward “may make additional acquisitions in the future”. Aave Labs posted a near-identical text on its own blog the same day, without the quote from its chief executive that the Payward version carries.

When headlines say Kraken buys AAVE, the buyer is in fact a Payward fund acting with its clients, and the tokens were bought on the secondary market. The text mentions no shares in any company. That matters because of June, when a report described a much bigger deal that included equity in Aave Group.

CoinDesk, which published its report at 9:00 a.m. EST (14:00 UTC) on 5 November, wrote that the announcement “makes no mention of equity”. The release’s own subheading says Payward and Aave “explore opportunities to collaborate on future initiatives”, without saying which. The Block, in its report the same day, also found no financial terms. We could not find any figure for the size of the purchase in any primary or secondary source, so this article gives none.

Kraken buys AAVE through a Payward fund and its clients

The release names the buyer precisely: Digital Asset Special Investments I, LP, described as “a Payward-affiliated” investment fund, acting together with its clients. It does not say whether Payward’s own balance sheet took part, how the fund is structured or who its clients are. The deal is presented as a milestone for Payward Asset Management, which the company calls one of its five key pillars and which offers investors digital asset, structured yield and tokenized products.

Payward also wrote that its “strong relationship with Aave” made what it calls a joint investment possible. The release does not say what that relationship consists of today.

Gurpreet Oberoi, vice president of Payward Asset Management and Institutional, said in the release: “This investment reflects our long-term conviction in onchain credit markets and DeFi.” He tied the purchase to client demand for exposure to that kind of infrastructure.

Stani Kulechov, founder and chief executive of Aave Labs, is quoted in the Payward release: “Working with Payward is a strategic step toward bringing Aave to the next wave of retail and institutional users.” He also said the investment showed confidence in the “Aave Will Win” framework, a plan we come back to below.

No amount, no price, no equity: what Payward did not disclose

Neither Payward nor Aave has said the following, and we could not establish it from other sources as of 6 November around 14:15 UTC:

• the number of AAVE tokens bought, their dollar value and the average price paid;
• who sold them: the release speaks only of “secondary market purchases”, names no counterparty and does not say whether any tokens came from the allocation Aave Labs holds;
• whether Payward’s own money is in the fund, or only clients’ money;
• whether the tokens are locked up, and whether the fund will use their votes in Aave governance;
• what the planned collaboration would involve, and whether the equity stake discussed in June is still on the table.

We also looked for traces of the vehicle itself. We found no registry filing for Digital Asset Special Investments I, LP, and no on-chain address labelled as belonging to it in the coverage. Payward, Aave and the press reports cited here give none. Without an address, nobody outside the companies can check the size of the position on-chain.

June’s report of a 15% equity deal, and why Kulechov called it inaccurate

The press linked Thursday’s news to an episode from 25 June 2026. That day, CoinDesk reported, citing two unnamed sources, that Payward was in talks to buy 15% of Aave at a $385 million valuation. According to CoinDesk’s recap on 5 November, the proposal involved 250,000 AAVE tokens and a 15% common equity stake in Aave Group.

Kulechov answered on X the same day. “First off, there is NO WAY we’d sell AAVE at a 70% discount lol,” he wrote, as quoted by The Block on 25 June. The Block noted that the reported valuation was about 30% of AAVE’s fully diluted value at the time, hence the discount he mentioned. He said the “article’s framing is inaccurate”.

He did not rule out every sale, though. “Aave Labs owns an allocation of AAVE that multiple market participants have discussed purchasing,” he wrote, adding that such deals could come directly or through longer-term partnerships, also per The Block. That sentence is why the June talks and the November purchase read as part of one story, even though neither company draws that link in Thursday’s release.

The two deals described are different in kind. June’s report was about a private transaction with Aave, at a negotiated price and with equity. November’s announcement is about tokens bought on the secondary market, with no company shares mentioned. Whether the first was dropped, reshaped into the second, or is still being discussed is not stated by anyone on the record.

Why buy AAVE on the open market rather than from Aave

Kulechov’s June objection was about price: a sale at a 70% discount. A purchase on the open market sidesteps that, because the fund pays what everyone else pays. A person familiar with the matter, quoted by CoinDesk without being named, said buying on the market rather than directly from Aave was a “signal of alignment” between the two companies. Neither company has said as much on the record.

The French site Coin Academy offered its own reading on 6 November: a market purchase leaves Payward in the same position as any other investor, with no private deal and no discount. That is the outlet’s analysis, not a statement from Payward. Coin Academy also suggested the June equity stake has not been formally ruled out; we found no source on the record for that, in either direction.

What AAVE holders get: votes and the “Aave Will Win” revenue pledge

AAVE does not represent shares of Aave Labs, the company that builds the software. It gives its holders voting rights over the Aave network and its treasury, run by the Aave DAO. Our AAVE coin page explains how the token, its supply and its staking work.

That is why the “Aave Will Win” framework is in the release. Approved by Aave governance in April 2026, with about 75% support according to The Block, it commits Aave Labs to send the revenue of Aave-branded products to the Aave DAO treasury, on top of the fees the network already earns. More of the money made around Aave is meant to reach the treasury that token holders govern.

In June, Kulechov put Aave’s annualized revenue at $134 million, directed to the DAO, according to The Block, and wrote: “No protocol or product revenue goes to Aave Labs,” which he described as a service provider to the DAO. He also said the team was designing “Aavenomics 3.0”, which would include “a new automated and non-discretionary buyback mechanism”. We have not seen a launch date for that mechanism in the sources for this article.

For a fund like Payward’s, those rules are the business case: a token whose holders steer a treasury fed by protocol and product revenue. How institutions approach that kind of exposure is the subject of our guide to institutional DeFi and what banks really adopt.

Aave in figures: $33 billion of deposits by its count, $16 billion of TVL by DefiLlama’s

The Payward release describes the Aave network as holding “$33 billion in net deposits and $11 billion in active loans”. The version of the text on Aave’s blog gives the same $33 billion but $12 billion of active loans. We report both because the two official pages differ.

Trackers count differently. DefiLlama showed Aave’s total value locked at $16.16 billion at 13:49 UTC on 6 November. That figure leaves out assets already lent out, which DefiLlama lists apart: $11.76 billion. The two sources use different methods, so their totals are not directly comparable.

DefiLlama’s daily series shows the effect of the Binance hack on 30 October and a partial recovery since:

The 30 October drop matches the day of the Binance hack, after which Aave left nine assets at zero loan-to-value; our report on Aave reopening with nine assets at zero LTV has the detail. By chain, Ethereum carried $13.27 billion of the total on 6 November, far ahead of Base ($0.54 billion), Arbitrum ($0.49 billion), Plasma ($0.41 billion), Avalanche ($0.37 billion), Monad ($0.30 billion) and BNB Chain ($0.19 billion).

The AAVE price fell on the day of the news

There was no visible jump in AAVE when the purchase became public. On Coinbase’s AAVE-USD market, the token opened the UTC day of 5 November at $131.60, traded between $122.24 and $133.76 and closed at $128.88, down 2.1%. The day before, it had closed at $131.63. On 6 November, the one-minute candle at 14:12 UTC closed at $130.47.

The whole market was falling at the same time. Around 14:13 UTC on 6 November, bitcoin traded near $75,540 and ether near $2,226, total crypto market value stood at about $2.57 trillion, down 7.02% over 24 hours, and the Fear and Greed index read 28. Nothing in that data lets anyone attribute AAVE’s moves to Payward’s purchase, in either direction, since the size of the order is not known.

Payward’s widening reach into DeFi

The AAVE purchase comes ten days after another Payward move in on-chain markets. On 27 October, Hyperliquid named it the first CFTC-regulated deployer of HIP-3 markets, a story covered in our report on Payward and Hyperliquid; those US markets were not yet approved at the time.

Cryptoast, writing on 6 November, placed the AAVE news next to Kraken’s plan to buy a European bank, which the French site covers separately. It also found it hard to say whether the purchase gives Payward anything beyond the vote any token holder has. We found no statement on that point from either company.

For readers outside the United States: the buyer is a fund affiliated with Payward, whose release is datelined Cheyenne, Wyoming, and nothing in the announcement says the fund is open to Kraken customers in the European Union or the United Kingdom. We found no comment from the AMF, Consob or the FCA on the deal.

What to watch after the Payward purchase

Payward has kept the door open to more buying, so the first thing to watch is whether it publishes a size, a wallet address or a filing for Digital Asset Special Investments I, LP. Any of those would answer the question this announcement leaves open.

The second is the collaboration the release announces. A product built with Aave, such as an Aave market for Kraken customers, would explain why an exchange operator wants exposure to the governance token. Nothing of the kind has been announced.

The third is on Aave’s side: the buyback mechanism of Aavenomics 3.0 that Kulechov described in June, and how the DAO treasury uses the revenue that “Aave Will Win” sends to it. No date has been given for either.