Aave targets 96 reserves, 6 chains for retirement in $98M cleanup

Aave proposed to deprecate 96 lending markets and exit six blockchain deployments, affecting $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt.

"After a comprehensive review, Aave is deprecating 50 low adoption asset reserves across multiple deployments," Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave, said on X on July 30. The proposal was authored by LlamaRisk, a DeFi risk service provider partly funded by the Aave DAO.

The cleanup covers 50 individual low-adoption reserves and 21 matured Pendle Principal Tokens across 11 Aave V3 deployments, plus the full wind-down of markets on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos. The six smaller chains hold $12.8 million in combined supply and $4.1 million in debt, with each generating less than $5,000 per quarter in protocol revenue — and less than $1,000 on the three smallest.

The proposal is at the ARFC stage and requires an on-chain governance vote before taking effect. If approved, it would mark a strategic retreat from Aave's earlier push to deploy broadly across emerging networks, redirecting resources toward Aave V4 and institutional markets — a shift the DAO backed with $25 million in funding.

Six Chains That Stopped Paying for Themselves

Deposits on the six targeted chains fell sharply over six months: Sonic dropped 74% to $7.6 million, Scroll fell 86% to $2.2 million, zkSync declined 88% to $844,000, Metis fell 79% to $297,000, Soneium dropped 95% to $173,000 and available liquidity on Aptos fell 94% to $1 million, according to the proposal. Each deployment now costs more to maintain than it earns.

How the Wind-Down Works

Aave will freeze affected markets, blocking new deposits and borrowing while leaving existing positions open. Supply and borrowing caps will be reduced to one token. For markets with outstanding loans, the reserve factor — the share of interest routed to the Aave treasury — will rise to 99 percent, and a 5 percent base borrowing rate will be introduced, encouraging borrowers to repay and depositors to withdraw. Once positions unwind, Aave plans to replace live price feeds with fixed-price oracles before fully retiring the markets.

The move concentrates Aave's resources on its highest-use deployments as competition in DeFi lending intensifies. Aave remains the largest decentralized lending protocol with about $14.5 billion in total value locked across 23 chains, according to DefiLlama. Its token traded at $95.52, down 2.75 percent over 24 hours.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.