Aave Founder and CEO: The CLARITY Act Has Failed
Aave Founder Stani: DeFi Wins Through Popularity
Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of the decentralized lending protocol Aave, commented after the failure of the CLARITY Act vote, stating, "The CLARITY Act has failed, and now DeFi needs to win through its own level of popularity."
According to previous reports, the CLARITY Act indeed failed to pass in the Senate that day—investment bank TD Cowen had predicted a 60% chance of the bill failing, and Senator Cynthia Lummis had warned that if the bill failed, it would be "over" for the U.S. Meanwhile, the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, French Hill, and the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Tim Scott, had expressed optimism about the vote, which ultimately contradicted their expectations.
Kulechov suggested that the DeFi industry should shift its focus from "waiting for clear legislation" to "creating products that millions truly need." Once DeFi products become "important enough to be ignored," regulation will naturally be forced to catch up.
He compared this approach to the "Uber path"—where Uber initially operated in a legal gray area or even directly violated taxi regulations in multiple cities, rapidly expanding its market through user scale and product stickiness, ultimately forcing regulatory agencies to adjust or redefine ride-hailing regulations to legalize it.
From a market mechanism perspective, Kulechov's statement effectively provides an alternative funding and development narrative for the DeFi industry following the failure of the CLARITY Act—if the path to regulatory clarity is blocked, the next allocation logic for industry capital and development resources will shift from "betting on regulatory dividends" to "betting on the established barriers created by user scale and product stickiness"; under this path, leading DeFi protocols that can quickly accumulate large numbers of real users and transaction volumes will gain a first-mover advantage, as once the user scale is large enough, the political cost of regulators actively halting or strictly limiting operations will also rise. Who benefits: leading DeFi protocols with a large user base and liquidity scale can continue to expand during periods of regulatory uncertainty with a "user scale as a moat" approach; who is under pressure: emerging protocols and compliance service providers that originally hoped to enter the market after the CLARITY Act passed, lacking prior user accumulation, may need to readjust their market entry timelines based on the previous expectation of "regulatory clarity."
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Stani Kulechov founded Aave (formerly ETHLend) in 2017, making it one of the earliest and currently largest protocols in the DeFi lending space; Aave has historically launched new products (such as flash loans, multi-chain deployment, and institutional products like Aave Arc) without clear regulatory guidance, consistently adopting a "build first, address regulation later" approach, which aligns closely with his proposed "Uber-style" strategy, reflecting his consistent operational style rather than a temporary response to the failure of the CLARITY Act.
From a resource mobilization perspective, Kulechov's statement signals that Aave and similar leading DeFi protocols will allocate more resources to product growth and user acquisition (such as lowering usage barriers, expanding institutional product lines, and multi-chain expansion), rather than solely relying on lobbying resources to promote regulatory legislation; this shift in resource allocation logic suggests that user scale and transaction volume themselves represent a form of "capital" that can counter regulatory uncertainty, and the larger the scale, the higher the degree to which the protocol is relied upon by the entire financial system, making it more costly politically and economically for regulators to impose a blanket ban even if regulations tighten in the future.
Uber's historical path is a classic example of this logic—during the early 2010s, Uber directly challenged local taxi licensing regulations in cities like New York and London, facing multiple lawsuits and operational bans, but due to strong user stickiness and scale effects, most cities eventually moved towards local legalization, creating separate regulatory frameworks for ride-hailing instead of outright banning it. The current stage of the DeFi industry is highly similar to Uber's phase of "expanding while litigating" between 2012 and 2015, a critical window where scale effects have not yet fully imposed factual constraints on regulation but are beginning to take shape.
This essentially represents a strategic shift in the "regulatory change" pathway: when the path of "gaining certainty through top-down legislation" is blocked, the industry opts for the alternative path of "forcing regulatory adaptation through market scale from the bottom up"; both paths ultimately aim for the same goal—an advantageous regulatory framework for the industry, just achieved through different means. Mechanically, the reason why "user scale forces regulation" may be effective is that once a service is relied upon by millions or even tens of millions of users, the political backlash cost faced by regulators for directly halting it will significantly rise, creating a "fait accompli" that constitutes a form of implicit bargaining power against regulatory agencies, akin to a version of the "too big to fail" logic in the regulatory battles of emerging tech industries.
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