Aave proposal grants one‑way emergency freeze powers

Aave DAO voters are deciding whether to grant Risk Stewards immediate emergency roles that can freeze markets on Ethereum and Avalanche. The Snapshot vote opened Sept. 3 at 15:46 UTC and is scheduled to close Sept. 6 at the same time. Voter approval alone will not enable the system; the governance package requires the V4 Security Council to execute corresponding payloads before the roles take effect.

The proposal would assign each Risk Steward four roles across Aave V4: Hub and Spoke risk-management roles plus Hub and Spoke emergency roles. All four roles would be granted without an execution delay after assignment. The current steward software release cannot invoke the emergency selectors and steward documentation does not expose those methods, so the emergency permissions would remain unusable until a later software release adds support.

Emergency roles are narrowly scoped and allow only one-way safety actions. Hub-level emergency calls can deactivate or halt entire assets and Spokes. Spoke-level emergency calls can pause or freeze individual reserves or all reserves within a Spoke. None of the emergency functions can reactivate, unhalt, unpause or unfreeze a market. Two-way flag-control roles that can toggle states in both directions would not be given to Risk Stewards and would remain separate.

Routine parameter updates would follow minimum cooldowns of 36, 48 or 72 hours depending on the parameter, and each update would be capped in how far it may change a value. Those limits would apply on both Ethereum and Avalanche and cover interest-rate parameters, collateral factors, liquidation thresholds and oracle caps. The cooldowns and caps do not apply to the emergency selectors.

Aave Labs states the Risk Steward contracts are undergoing a Certora audit and that the engagement is nearing completion; the governance package does not present the code as fully audited. Forum contributors requested additional safeguards, including publication of rationales for steward actions, post-action reports, periodic reviews and disclosure of the frequency and size of steward interventions. The current proposal does not include those measures as requirements.

If Snapshot voters approve the proposal and the V4 Security Council executes the payloads, Risk Stewards would gain no-delay access to bounded parameter controls immediately. The one-way emergency powers would be assigned in role definitions but would remain inactive until a future steward software release enables the emergency selectors.