# Ending the ACI Frontier program

Source: https://governance.aave.com/t/ending-the-aci-frontier-program/24480
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Ending-the-ACI-Frontier-program?index=0x69e4d84b156417172bdedcc3aedc6236280bf5747c53e3be6c6c132ca32c15864a3da1f1
Submitted by misha on 2026-04-19 UTC, 1 upvote, 0 comments

## Summary

Marc Zeller of the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) announced that ACI is ending the Frontier staking program effective immediately, citing the rsETH collateral situation and the potential risk of a wETH shortfall and bad debt on Aave V3 Core and other instances. All ETH staked through Frontier will be unstaked and made available to the Aave DAO to protect wETH depositors, and ACI is renouncing all latent revenue tied to the service up to the exit. Frontier began in January 2024 with 32 Stader minipools funded with 128 wETH and was expanded in May 2024. The unwind involves exiting all Frontier validators and transferring the unstaked ETH to the Aave Finance Committee or another address governance designates.

## Article

Ending the ACI Frontier program

Title Ending the ACI Frontier program

Author: Marc Zeller, ACI (Aave Chan Initiative)

Date: 2026-04-18

Summary

Given the rsETH collateral situation and the potential risk of a wETH shortfall and bad debt on Aave V3 Core and other instances, the Aave Chan Initiative is ending the Frontier staking program effective immediately.

All ETH currently staked through Frontier will be unstaked and made available to the Aave DAO, to be deployed as governance sees fit to protect wETH depositors. ACI also renounces all latent revenue tied to the service up to the exit.

Context on Frontier

Frontier was introduced in [ARFC] Introducing “Frontier” - Staking as a Service for the Aave DAO (January 2024) as a Staking-as-a-Service product for the Aave DAO, starting with 32 Stader minipools funded with 128 wETH. It was expanded through [ARFC] Expansion of “Frontier” (May 2024), extending the DAO’s direct validator footprint.

Across its lifetime, ACI provided:

Yield guarantee at LST index yield

Full slashing protection backed by ACI’s treasury

Operational management of all validators, keys and infrastructure

The program made the Aave DAO the first DAO to produce blocks and secure the Ethereum consensus layer directly.

Actions

Initiate full voluntary exit on all Frontier validators.

Transfer the full unstaked ETH balance to the Aave Finance Committee, or to any address governance designates.

Renounce all outstanding performance fees and program fees owed to ACI up to the exit.

The Frontier multisig (aci.eth, Tokenlogic, Karpatkey) remains in place to sign exit and transfer transactions during the unwind.

Rationale

Frontier was built on the idea that alignment with the Aave DAO comes before program revenue. When protocol users are at risk, that principle takes priority over the program itself. This contribution might not fully cover a shortfall, but the ETH belongs back with the DAO in this situation, without conditions.

Happy to coordinate execution with Aave Finance, the risk service providers, Labs and BGD here in this thread.

ACI team