# Talking About AAVE Really Leaves a Bad Taste

Mentioning AAVE truly leaves a sour taste in your mouth—it's a textbook case of squandering a winning hand.

Our original logic was always straightforward: in crypto, survival of the fittest is the norm. If AAVE was really on the decline, everyone could understand it was due to fierce competitors—maybe a new lending protocol emerged with better technology and higher yields, stealing market share and causing its price to drop. That kind of loss, we'd call losing to the times, nothing to be ashamed of.

But here's what actually happened? It didn't lose to competitors, and it didn't lose to technology either. It's purely self-inflicted—internal "explosions" that knocked it down. It's like a powerhouse boxer who never got KO'd in the ring but instead wrecked himself during training in the back. Talk about frustrating, right?

Many people only look at the surface of crypto projects and think AAVE's fundamentals look fine—the Total Value Locked (TVL) is there, lending business is still running, nothing looks like a dead project. But that "polished surface" is precisely what's most deceptive. In crypto, code can be forked, but teams and people's hearts cannot. Leadership changes, core team reshuffles—these aren't minor issues. It's like a famous restaurant chain: the signboard hasn't changed, the decoration hasn't changed, but the owner and head chef behind the scenes have completely changed. The first few days after reopening, the dishes might still look the same, but after eating for a while you'll discover the taste has changed, service has gotten worse, and that original "spirit and vigor" is gone.

The hidden risks from this internal turmoil reveal themselves pretty quickly when you stretch the timeline a bit. New management might make reckless decisions for short-term gains, or incompetent leadership might steer the project off course, or they might just be cashing out. In situations like this, projects have already lost their innovation capacity and can only live off past achievements.

So right now, for us regular people, AAVE really doesn't warrant any expectations. In the short term, it has neither strong upside momentum nor can we rule out more chaos from internal conflicts. Facing this situation, the strategy is actually simple: either you think it's too weak and short it at a high point to make some quick money; or completely blacklist it and not even look at it, don't keep daydreaming about buying the dip. For projects weakening from internal decay, buying the dip is too easy to hit the middle of the mountain, and you'll end up buried. $AAVE