DeFi won, but at what cost?
AAAlpha Recap #20: Aave Buyback Cut, Tempo Launch, and Tally's Closure
March 20, 2026
In this new edition of the Alpha Recap, we look back at the week's key insights from the crypto market: major news, yield and airdrop strategies, essential data points, and quick takes - all designed to cut through the noise.
The Alpha Recap aims to bring you the most important crypto market Alphas of the week. Every Friday, we deliver a digest of the most valuable insights from our Alpha Feed.
Exclusive to OAK Premium members, the Alpha Feed brings together market insights, yield and airdrop strategies, and key market intelligence -- in other words, the DNA of OAK Research: filtered content that cuts through the noise.
Aave Cuts Its Buyback by 40%
This week, Aave's DAO approved the first step of a significant reduction to its buyback program through a proposal submitted as an ARFC. Concretely, the proposal calls for the annual buyback budget to drop from $50M to $30M -- a 40% cut -- bringing daily repurchases down from 487 to 292 AAVE.
Championed by TokenLogic, the decision comes against a backdrop of deteriorating protocol fundamentals. Borrowing revenues have declined 25% from their peak, falling from $13.5M in January 2025 to $7.95M a year later, while projected operating expenses for 2026 stand at $190M versus the $142M generated in 2025. Under these conditions, sustaining aggressive treasury-funded buybacks is becoming untenable.
The proposal also introduces a methodological shift: repurchases would no longer be funded exclusively in stablecoins, but partly through volatile assets held by the DAO -- notably ETH -- in order to preserve the liquidity needed for day-to-day expenses.
Passed with 99.13% approval, the proposal still needs to clear an AIP vote. While the adjustment looks sound from a budgetary standpoint, it nonetheless sends a negative signal for the token, which is already down 60% over the past six months and 24% year-to-date.
Tempo, the Stripe and Paradigm Blockchain, Launches Its Mainnet
This week, Tempo launched its mainnet. Incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, the project raised $500 million last October at a $5 billion valuation. Tempo's thesis is straightforward: if stablecoins are to become a native layer of online commerce, adapting them to general-purpose blockchains won't be enough. They need dedicated infrastructure, capable of absorbing high volumes without congestion and with predictable costs.
The launch is also accompanied by the Machine Payments Protocol, co-developed with Stripe, which defines how software agents can pay each other without human intervention. Rather than issuing a transaction for every interaction, an agent pre-provisions funds and draws them down progressively, with microtransactions aggregated into a single settlement operation. A new standard that puts it in direct competition with the x402 protocol developed by Coinbase.
Tempo has already been integrated by Visa, Lightspark, and Stripe into their own rails. Over 100 services are compatible at launch, with players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mastercard, and Shopify actively working on concrete use cases.
Longer term, Tempo aims to be fully permissionless, support all stablecoins, and includes a native AMM to streamline cross-currency swaps. Validators remain permissioned for now, and the chain still has everything to prove in live conditions. But the positioning is serious, and the cap table speaks for itself.
Tally Shuts Down -- Is This the End of DAOs?
This week, Tally announced it is winding down. Over one million users, more than one billion dollars in payments processed, and yet it wasn't enough. As a reminder, Tally is one of the most widely used governance infrastructures in the EVM ecosystem, hosting DAOs such as Compound, Arbitrum, Optimism, ZKsync, and Uniswap.
The stated reason is blunt: DAOs are no longer viable. For five years, Tally had bet on a decentralization thesis that never really materialized. The project anticipated an ecosystem of hundreds of active Layer 2s, each with engaged communities participating in their governance. In reality, only around ten Layer 2s see meaningful usage, voter turnout has consistently been anemic, and decisions have largely remained concentrated in the hands of the largest wallets and delegates.
The regulatory environment delivered the final blow to what was once a landmark model. Before the SEC's change of course under the Trump administration, the risk of securities reclassification pushed projects to maintain a facade of decentralized governance as a legal shield.
With that risk now gone, one of the last remaining reasons to maintain a formal DAO has evaporated alongside it. Uniswap and Aave -- two of the most emblematic models of on-chain governance -- have already begun restructuring to prioritize execution over process.
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