Aave founder Stani Kulechov said the lending protocol plans to retire 50 low-adoption asset reserves and wind down its deployments on six blockchain networks. The changes cover approximately $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in debt. The plan comes from a governance proposal that still needs DAO approval.
Aave will retire dozens of low-use asset reserves and wind down its deployments on six blockchain networks, founder Stani Kulechov said on July 30. The changes cover approximately $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in debt. However, the measures originate from an Aave governance proposal and require DAO approval before full implementation.
The proposal would remove 50 individual reserves, retire 21 matured Pendle principal tokens and close 25 reserves across Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos. According to Kulechov's July 30 statement: "After a comprehensive review, Aave is deprecating 50 low adoption asset reserves across multiple deployments."
Six smaller markets have lost most of their deposits
Those six complete deployments hold $12.8 million in combined supply and $4.1 million in debt. Sonic is the largest, with $7.6 million supplied and $2.7 million borrowed; its deposits have fallen 74% over six months.
Scroll deposits declined 86% to $2.2 million, while zkSync fell 88% to $844,000. Aptos liquidity fell 94% over six months, leaving $1.7 million supplied and $719,000 borrowed.
LlamaRisk said these deployments generated too little revenue to cover the cost of maintaining price feeds, monitoring systems and operational support. That conclusion reflects the risk provider's assessment and remains subject to governance review.
Fifty reserves face removal across larger deployments
The rest of the proposal targets 50 low-adoption reserves and 21 matured Pendle principal tokens across 11 Aave deployments, which together account for $85.3 million in supplied assets and $11.5 million in debt. Assets marked for removal include low-use collateral, older bridged tokens and duplicate versions of assets that now have native alternatives, such as bridged USDC variants in markets where native USDC is already available.
FBTC and eBTC wrappers on Ethereum form the largest affected positions, holding about $16.3 million in supply but only around $63,000 in borrowing. Their balances have fallen sharply because the expected demand for using them as collateral did not develop.
Aave would first freeze the affected reserves and reduce supply and borrowing caps to one unit. Existing positions could remain open, but users would be unable to make new deposits, borrow more funds or use the affected assets as fresh collateral.
For markets with outstanding loans, the proposal would raise the reserve factor, directing more interest to the Aave treasury and reducing returns for suppliers. Whole-market closures would use a 99% reserve factor and a 5% base borrowing rate to encourage borrowers to repay and depositors to withdraw.
DAO approval remains the next step
Once positions have largely unwound, Aave plans to replace live price feeds with fixed-price oracles before completely retiring the six markets. The proposal currently sits at the Aave Request for Comment stage, which normally proceeds to an off-chain Snapshot vote before reaching a binding Aave Improvement Proposal and an on-chain vote.
Therefore, users do not need to close their positions immediately solely because of Kulechov's announcement. Aave remains the largest decentralized lending protocol, with about $14.5 billion in total value locked across 23 chains.
Source: crypto.news
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
