ACI Leaving Aave DAO, Mantle Dominating Stablecoin Inflows, Weekly Trading Outlook
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Key Takeaways:
📈 Institutional flows show early signs of recovery — ETF inflows turned positive for the first time in six weeks, but on-chain behavior tells a different story, with capital rotating toward safety rather than risk.
🔒 Stable yields are the clear winner this cycle — Incentivized and lending protocols are dominating TVL growth, signaling that traders aren’t ready to go aggressive just yet.
⚡ This Friday could be a turning point — Non-Farm Payroll data drops amid mounting geopolitical tensions, setting the stage for potential market-wide volatility.
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This week holds some major announcements, particularly the Non-Farm Payroll and unemployment rate data release this Friday, which may bring heightened volatility amid escalating geopolitical tensions and rising uncertainty between the US and Iran
🚨Breaking News🚨
The Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) is leaving Aave DAO after 3 years of service. Here’s what happened:
What ACI Accomplished
8-person team over 3 years, costing $4.6M total
Drove 61% of governance actions and 48% of protocol revenue
Grew GHO supply from $35M to $527M with 65%+ market share
Deployed $101M in incentives
Why They’re Leaving
The pivotal moment was governance conflicts around accountability and transparency:
December 2025: Questions raised about ~$5M in partner fees routed to Aave Labs without governance approval
February 2026: ACI pushed for mandatory conflict-of-interest disclosures for service providers
The disclosure proposal was defeated (604K vs 689K), with 96% of opposing votes from one wallet cluster
Aave Working Week (AWW) proposal: Labs requested a massive $51M budget bundled with V4 ratification
ACI set four conditions for responsible approval (IP transfer, exit clause, revenue guardrails, phased budget) - all went unaddressed
BGD Labs (the core engineering team) walked away entirely
The AWW vote passed 622K to 497K - but ACI’s analysis showed that without Labs-linked voting power (234K), it would have failed 387K to 497K
Core issue: ACI concluded they couldn’t operate independently when the largest budget recipient controlled enough voting power to pass its own proposals.
The Exit Plan
Stream settlement: ACI is requesting only 120 days of their remaining 251-day GHO stream (~986K GHO) as a lump sum. The other 131 days (~1.17M GHO) returns to the DAO.
They’re doing a 4-month wind-down, including:
Implementing outstanding commitments
Open-sourcing all tools, dashboards, and governance infrastructure
Transferring delegate coordination and operational management
Documenting all systems for successors
Their reasoning for the lump sum: They don’t trust the current governance process (controlled by one entity) to keep their stream active while they execute the transition.
Last Week’s Movers.
Last week’s best-performing assets are largely similar to the prior week’s, though this time crypto-related winners have emerged — notably NEAR, which just launched its privacy intents, and Morpho, demonstrating resilience amid Aave’s escalating governance tensions.
RWA-related assets continue to shine in today’s market. Additionally, Bloomberg and other media outlets cited on-chain oil prices from Hyperliquid in weekend news coverage, as CME quotes are not live on weekends.
First Weekly Net Inflows in 6 Weeks
Stablecoin flows were essentially flat at +$446M (+0.3%), with very minimal activity. This can actually be a positive signal, as it shows that money is not leaving crypto — though what matters more is where capital is actually flowing into.
This week's flows were led by USDC at +$772M, a sub-1% increase from last week's supply. USDS continues to gain traction, adding $211M (+3%) in a highly volatile market environment — consistent with our thesis that during periods of volatility, on-chain traders tend to allocate more into safe, stable yield products like sUSDS, which recently hit an all-time high in supply.
So, while ETF flows have flipped back to net inflows after five weeks of outflows, on-chain sentiment still points toward a more conservative stance.
At this point, the winners are becoming quite clear: incentivized strategies and stable yields are outperforming riskier, high-return alternatives.
On-chain trading activity has visibly slowed, with USDT and Tron’s stablecoin inflows declining. Meanwhile, Mantle’s incentives on Aave continue to gain massive traction, adding +$267M and leading all top-20 chains this week with 28% growth.
Ethereum posted minor gains this week, but not significant enough to be noteworthy — the same can be said for Solana and Hyperliquid.
Polygon, however, is quite interesting. New strategies have emerged on Polymarket — such as 5-minute BTC up/down predictions and quantitative methods that could translate into profits for arbitrageurs — and these have rapidly scaled TVL as more participants engage in prediction market activity, particularly given the volume of ongoing geopolitical events.
In a high-volatility market, options markets are among the most affected financial instruments. Mainstreet Finance is one of the DeFi protocols monetizing this environment and generating yield from it.
In addition to a model well-suited for current conditions, Mainstreet is also distributing rewards and incentives across several liquidity protocols, further boosting its TVL growth.
Mainstreet isn’t alone — protocols like Ekubo, TermMax, and others are also gaining in TVL. Predominantly, lending and incentivized protocols are the winners in this environment, signaling that capital is not yet ready to be deployed into more aggressive trading strategies or re-enter the market broadly.
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