Aave

In 2017, Aave was founded as ETHLend, focused on P2P lending.

In January 2020, Aave rebranded and launched V1, pioneering flash loans.

In December 2020, Aave V2 launched, adding collateral swaps and credit delegation.

In 2021, Aave expanded to Polygon, Avalanche and other chains, with borrowing growing fast.

In March 2022, Aave V3 launched, introducing cross-chain portals and eMode.

In July 2023, Aave launched its native stablecoin GHO.

In 2024, Aave became DeFi's largest lending protocol, leading in TVL and revenue.

In 2025, Aave governance passed the V4 proposal, planning a cross-chain liquidity layer.

In March 2026, Aave V4 went live on mainnet, introducing unified liquidity and a modular architecture.

V4 multi-chain expansion: V4 went live on Avalanche on July 15 with dedicated RWA liquidity hubs and a $15 million KPI incentive package; V4 deposits surpassed $1 billion in September as protocol TVL climbed to about $22.1 billion; an Equities Hub on Base now accepts seven Coinbase tokenized stocks as collateral for USDC borrowing.

Token economics: The $50 million annual buyback continues, with weekly purchases of $250,000 to $1.75 million routed to the DAO reserve; founder Stani Kulechov said on September 28 that burning repurchased tokens is under consideration for Aavenomics 3.0 but is not yet approved. V4's unified liquidity layer and dynamic rate curves anchor the strategy, with GHO at the core and a $1 billion RWA-deposit target.

On March 30, 2026, Aave's V4 activated on Ethereum mainnet with a hub-and-spoke design that concentrates liquidity in Core, Prime and Plus hubs while individual spokes set their own collateral and risk parameters; in July V4 expanded to Avalanche for the first time and the Global Dollar Hub went live, with USDG deposits above $60 million in its first month.

In April roughly $290 million of fake rsETH collateral from Kelp DAO hit Aave's markets and left about $200 million in bad debt that the DAO coordinated to absorb. In July it launched Stable Vaults, embedding fixed-rate stablecoin yield into wallets, exchanges and payment apps, and opened the Aave App waitlist; that month V4 deposits passed $300 million and active loans $100 million. As of October 17 V4 held about $655 million in deposits, GHO circulation was near $698 million and protocol TVL around $18 billion. Governance directed product revenue to the treasury and set a $50 million annual buyback.

Future strategy and roadmap: After the AWW framework passed in April, Aave routed 100% of brand-product revenue to its DAO treasury, trading roughly $51 million for V4 development in exchange for V4 becoming the sole technical foundation - at the cost of ACI and BGD Labs exiting, with the codebase and brand still held by Aave Labs and governance checks weakened. Commercially, V4 Spokes split new asset classes into separate risk domains and Horizon takes RWA through a permissioned venue, where the $1.118 million average institutional loan is about 16 times the protocol average, the point of difference against Morpho's curator model; GHO and Umbrella supply stablecoin and bad-debt buffers, and expansion speed depends on whether risk premia cover each new Spoke. It holds roughly 60% of DeFi lending, yet the interest spread is commoditizing.

Aave was founded by Stani Kulechov, who studied law at the University of Helsinki. He started ETHLend in Helsinki in 2017 as peer-to-peer onchain lending, and in 2020 rebuilt the protocol around pooled liquidity and handed governance to the community. He later renamed the company Avara, which also houses the Lens social protocol and the GHO stablecoin, while he remains the driving force at Aave Labs and chairs the protocol direction review.

On the operating side, COO Jordan Gustave and CFO Peter Kerr split the running of the company; Kerr came from HSBC and Deutsche Bank and has built out finance and treasury process since 2021. Chief compliance officer Nicole Butler arrived from Coinbase's UK team. Governance is shaped by the Aave Chan Initiative founded by Marc Zeller, one of the largest delegates in the DAO. Risk parameters are assessed by independent teams at Gauntlet and Chaos Labs, each with researchers on the forum who sync with the protocol group weekly.

Aave has recently welcomed several key team members. In March 2026, Linda Jeng joined as Chief Legal & Policy Officer, having previously served at the Federal Reserve and the Financial Stability Board, and founded Digital Self Labs. In April 2026, Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo joined as Chief Strategy and Business Officer, previously serving as COO at Ava Labs. In July 2026, Justin D'Errico and George Bennett joined as Principal Backend Engineer and Data, respectively. These changes indicate Aave is strengthening its legal, strategic, and technical capabilities to advance its lending protocol and RWA (Real-World Asset) strategy.

Aave charges a partner fee on swaps routed through the Aave Labs API of 0.15% for correlated asset pairs such as ETH/wstETH and 0.25% for all other pairs.

Aave sources swap execution from CoW Protocol at a 0.02% provider fee, reduced to 0.003% for tokens on its reduced-fee list of major stablecoins and RWAs; position swaps that require a flash loan also pay a 0.05% flash loan fee to the protocol treasury.

Aave Labs' UK arm Push holds a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) cryptoasset-business registration and an electronic-money institution (EMI) authorisation; its Irish unit holds a Central Bank of Ireland crypto-asset service provider (CASP) licence under the EU MiCA framework (Nov 2025).