Aave has surpassed $1 trillion in cumulative lending volume, becoming the first decentralized finance protocol to reach the milestone.
“Ten years ago, DeFi and Aave didn’t exist — they were just concepts,” Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “Today, Aave serves as the backbone of onchain lending, driving a new financial system that is open, global, and unstoppable.”
Kulechov said the achievement represents another step toward Aave’s ambition to become the “largest and most efficient liquidity network in the world” — one that builders, banks, and fintech companies integrate with by default to enhance liquidity and reduce costs across global finance.
In August, Aave Labs introduced Aave Horizon, a dedicated lending market built on Ethereum, aimed at traditional finance institutions and other professional investors seeking to borrow stablecoins against tokenized real-world assets.
Asset managers including VanEck, WisdomTree and Securitize were among the early adopters of Aave’s institutional-focused platform.
On Feb. 15, Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov said DeFi lending could expand further through the tokenization of what he called “abundance assets,” such as solar energy systems, battery storage and robotics used for labor. He projected that these sectors could collectively be worth $50 trillion by 2050.
Kulechov first launched the protocol as ETHLend in November 2017 before rebranding it to Aave in September 2018. The platform now secures more than $27.2 billion in total value locked (TVL), allowing users to earn yield on deposits and borrow crypto-backed loans instantly.
Aave currently leads major DeFi lending platforms by TVL, ahead of competitors such as Morpho, JustLend, SparkLend, Maple, Kamin Lend and Compound Finance, each of which holds over $1 billion in TVL. Over the past 30 days, Aave has generated more than $83.3 million in fees — nearly four times as much as its closest rival, Morpho.
DAO proposal sparks internal debate
The milestone comes as the Aave community remains divided over a governance proposal concerning funding and revenue allocation between Aave Labs and the protocol’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
Holders of the AAVE token have been asked to approve a compensation package of up to $42.5 million in stablecoins along with 75,000 AAVE tokens for Aave Labs.
In exchange, Aave Labs would direct all revenue generated from Aave-branded products to the Aave DAO treasury under a DAO-funded operational structure.
