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Aave Labs went public about the tension between its labs entity and its DAO. Stani Kulechov wrote about it. And it’s not just Aave — protocols across DeFi are wrestling with the same question: can a DAO actually govern a protocol, or does it just slow everything down?

Laura Shin put that question to two DeFi lending founders who landed in very different places.

Paul Frambot, co-founder of Morpho, made the protocol itself immutable. No governance at the protocol level. The token owns the fee treasury — that’s it. “I can’t even change the protocol. No one can.”

Sid Powell, CEO of Maple Finance, took a different approach: keep decentralization, but structure delegation so the core team has real operational discretion. “Imagine if Steve Jobs had to get approval from hundreds of people for every product decision he wanted to make ahead of time — you might risk never having had bets like the iPhone.”

Same problem. Two very different solutions.

Host: Laura Shin

Guests:

  • Paul Frambot, Co-Founder & CEO at Morpho Labs
  • Sid Powell, CEO & Co-Founder at Maple Finance