ACI just dropped the most transparent governance report I've seen in DeFi.

8 people. $4.625M paid by the DAO over three years. And they started four months before they saw a single dollar.
Here's what they actually built and why it matters right now.
In February 2024, WETH borrows on Aave sat at around $1.1B. Not bad.. but not where the opportunity was.
ACI saw something. They onboarded weETH, rsETH, and ezETH as collateral, and configured eMode at 93% LTV for ETH-correlated pairs. The loop is elegant: supply an LRT, borrow WETH, convert to more LRT, repeat. Every cycle stacks borrow demand and generates interest revenue for the DAO.
But the real architecture is deeper than the loop itself. LRT holders borrow wstETH. wstETH holders borrow WETH. Demand compounds across layers instead of every asset fighting for the same pool. That's why it scaled the way it did.
Then came the key parameter call — they raised weETH's Reserve Factor from 15% to 45%. One governance proposal. The DAO's cut on the fastest-growing collateral tripled overnight.
They didn't just guess it worked. They scanned 2,704 borrower wallets on-chain. weETH holders alone account for 57.9% of all WETH borrowing. All ACI-onboarded LRTs together hit 75.1%. Add wstETH and you reach 97.6%.
Nearly all WETH borrow demand on Aave traces back to the stack they built.
Result: WETH borrows went from $1.1B to $5.87B. WETH became Aave's single largest revenue asset at $37M — 28% of total protocol revenue from one asset. Morpho can't reproduce this because on @aave, collateral earns supply APY on top of restaking yield.
On Morpho it just sits idle. ACI built around that structural edge early and captured 85%+ of the entire LRT market.
Ethena was Morpho's headline product. ACI pulled it onto Aave and turned the same assets into an $18.5M/year revenue engine. Morpho generated $0 from the same market.
They onboarded sUSDe, USDe, eUSDe, and Pendle Principal Tokens across 12 different expiry batches. The PT vote was genuinely contentious — 69% at TEMP CHECK, then somehow 99.99% at the final ARFC. Risky, debated, and it paid off.
At peak, Aave was holding $6.8B in Ethena assets. More than half of all USDe in DeFi was sitting on Aave. Morpho had around $1B across the same assets.
The revenue outcome: $18.5M/year for Aave. $0 for Morpho.
The structural reason is the same as the LRT engine — on Aave, collateral earns supply interest inside the pool. On Morpho it's idle. Users had a real financial incentive to bring capital to Aave and none to park it elsewhere. ACI identified that edge and built both engines around it before anyone else was thinking about it systematically.
The Ethena footprint has since cooled from $6.8B to $2.35B as PT batches matured — that's expected. Engines peak, then cool off. The job is to run the current one while building the next. ACI's already shepherding the next wave through governance: Syrup, USDG, Strata srUSDe PTs, frxUSD, USDai.
Combined across both engines: $68M+ out of $141.8M total protocol revenue. Verified on-chain across 254 assets, 22 markets, 16 chains.
That's 48% of all Aave revenue. Two strategies. One 8-person team.
Here's why this report actually matters beyond the numbers.
The DAO is currently evaluating a ~$51M budget ask. That's more than every other service provider combined. About 11x what ACI costs annually.
ACI put themselves on the scoreboard first. Three questions, answered publicly, on-chain:
What did you deliver? $5.2M → $142M. 27x revenue growth. 1,140 governance actions. $101M in incentives deployed with $80M partner-
funded.
What did it cost? $4.625M over three years. $3M/year. 10% of the full SP ecosystem budget.
What's the return? $29 in protocol revenue growth for every $1 the DAO paid.
Every token holder should be asking those same three questions before the ~$51M ask gets approved.
Full report with visuals and on-chain methodology: