Aave Fully Commits to DeFi, Discontinues Avara Brand and Family Wallet

Aave founder Stani Kulechov has revealed that the decentralized finance protocol will be discontinuing its Family iOS wallet over the next year and will be retiring the Avara brand as the organization fully consolidates its operations under Aave Labs.

This strategic withdrawal from consumer wallet offerings stems from the belief that mainstream users are more likely to engage with crypto through specialized financial applications, such as savings and lending, rather than through general-purpose wallets.

The Family wallet will cease onboarding new users starting April 1, while existing users will retain access to the app until April 2027, after which they will transition to Aave’s infrastructure.

This change follows Aave’s recent transfer of control of its Lens Protocol social network to Mask Network, marking a significant refocusing after years of ecosystem growth and internal governance challenges.

We are winding down the Family iOS wallet. Family Accounts will continue to power the Aave App as part of Aave’s infrastructure, helping bring millions of users into DeFi.
In 2023, we partnered with the Family team because they were the strongest design team in the space. This… https://t.co/jYgb5OPXVU

— Stani.eth (@StaniKulechov) February 3, 2026

Purpose-Built Products Replace Open-Ended Wallet Strategy

Kulechov indicated that this decision is informed by insights gained from efforts to onboard millions of users through various product strategies.

“Through this journey, we’ve learned that onboarding millions of users requires purpose-built experiences, such as savings, rather than generic, open-ended wallet experiences,” he stated in the announcement.

The Family team, which was acquired by Avara in 2023 for their design expertise, contributed to multiple Aave products, including Aave Pro, the mobile application, and the protocol’s branding.

As per the company’s announcement, their core technology, Family Accounts, will continue to facilitate authentication and embedded wallet features across Aave’s product range instead of functioning as an independent consumer application.

Current Family users will retain complete control of their funds via accounts.aave.com using their credentials, although app functionality will gradually be restricted to account access and withdrawals only.

Kulechov highlighted that this infrastructure approach fosters “a more seamless user journey, stronger safety protections, and more intuitive interfaces, while preserving user sovereignty and full control of funds.”

In 2023, Avara acquired @Family, bringing in an exceptionally talented design engineering team.
We believe future DeFi users will prefer purpose-built financial experiences over open-ended wallet explorers.
Thus, we’ll phase out the Family iOS app over the next year.

— Avara (@avara) February 3, 2026

Consolidation Follows Governance Turmoil and Regulatory Wins

The brand consolidation follows a tumultuous six-month period during which Aave encountered allegations of governance manipulation and internal conflicts regarding asset ownership.

In December, Kulechov acquired approximately $10 million worth of AAVE tokens shortly before a contentious vote, leading critics, including DeFi strategist Robert Mullins, to claim that the action was intended to enhance voting power rather than reflect a long-term commitment.

Community tensions heightened when Aave Labs unilaterally advanced a proposal to vote on brand asset ownership without informing its author, Ernesto Boado of BGD Labs.

Aave Labs unilaterally pushed a brand ownership proposal to vote without author notification, escalating governance tensions over protocol asset control and value extraction.#Dao #Aavehttps://t.co/2uRM8QM6Jy

— Cryptonews.com (@cryptonews) December 22, 2025

“This is not, in ethos, my proposal,” Boado asserted, adding that Aave Labs “breaks all codes of trust with the community” by hastily submitting the proposal during what had been a constructive forum discussion.

Contributors expressed concerns that certain product decisions, including the replacement of Paraswap with CowSwap integration, redirected an estimated $10 million annually in fees away from the DAO treasury toward private entities.

Marc Zeller of the Aave Chan Initiative contended that the DAO had financed brand assets “four times” through the original LEND token sale, dilution, liquidity mining programs, and service provider fees.

Snapshot data indicated that the top three wallets controlled over 58% of voting power, with the largest wallet holding more than 27%, exacerbating worries about whale dominance and conflicts of interest within the ecosystem.

Despite internal discord, Aave achieved regulatory clarity when the Securities and Exchange Commission concluded its multi-year investigation without recommending enforcement action in December, bringing an end to nearly four years of uncertainty, and also received MiCA authorization in Europe.

The transfer of the Lens Protocol to Mask Network in January represented another aspect of Aave’s consolidation strategy.

Kulechov emphasized that “all functions move to Mask,” including IP, chain infrastructure, and social media accounts, while Lens remains permissionless infrastructure.

Over the years, we have built some of the most important onchain financial primitives. We later expanded that ambition to social primitives that users truly own.
We built the Lens Protocol and its underlying onchain rails, including state-of-the-art decentralized data storage… https://t.co/g0zLIUlaBh

— Stani.eth (@StaniKulechov) January 20, 2026

Aave continues to be one of the largest DeFi platforms by total value locked, exceeding $45 billion in October.

The Estonia-born, Finland-raised founder, who recently acquired a £22 million mansion in London’s Notting Hill, is preparing to launch Aave V4.

All current and future products will now operate solely under the Aave Labs brand as the organization concentrates its resources on “building Aave brand awareness and introducing DeFi to millions of new users globally.”

The post Aave Goes All-In on DeFi, Shuts Down Avara Brand and Family Wallet appeared first on Cryptonews.