Aave V4 has crossed $400 million in total deposits, a new all-time high for the protocol version that only reached mainnet in May 2026. The milestone follows a run from roughly $50 million in early May to $350 million by August 3, alongside a hub-and-spoke redesign and new support for real-world assets, while the older V3 version keeps running in parallel with $19.4 billion in its own TVL.
Aave V4 has crossed $400 million in total deposits, marking a new all-time high for the protocol version that only went live on mainnet a few months ago. The milestone lands shortly after Aave V4 recorded $350 million in deposits on August 3, 2026, a figure Aave founder Stani Kulechov acknowledged as a stepping stone toward the $400 million threshold now crossed.
From $50 million to $400 million in three months
The Aave DAO approved the V4 activation on May 4, 2026, following an extended testnet period. Deposits sat near $50 million in early May, climbed to roughly $100 million by June, then pushed into the $200 million-$300 million range between late June and July before breaking $350 million at the start of August.
As of mid-August 2026, V4's total value locked sat in the $217 million-$225 million range, primarily concentrated on Ethereum. The gap between that TVL figure and the $400 million deposit headline reflects the difference between net locked capital and gross deposits flowing through the system. V4's TVL grew roughly 26%-36% over a single 30-day period leading into mid-August.
A hub-and-spoke redesign
V4 is not a cosmetic upgrade. The core architectural shift is a move to what Aave calls a Liquidity Hub and Borrow Spokes model, a hub-and-spoke design where liquidity pools are managed centrally while individual borrowing markets branch off as spokes. Each spoke can be configured independently, so a problem in one lending market does not automatically spread to others.
The upgrade also introduces native support for real-world assets alongside traditional crypto lending, a capability that expands Aave's potential user base beyond on-chain native borrowers and into institutional participants who need compliant exposure to tokenized assets.
V3 keeps running in parallel
V3 continues to operate alongside V4 rather than being shut down. As of April 2026, V3 carried roughly $19.4 billion in TVL across chains. For AAVE token holders, deposit growth on V4 translates into fee generation and protocol revenue that flows back through governance-controlled mechanisms, so a protocol running $400 million on V4 and $19.4 billion on V3 at the same time is generating revenue from both systems simultaneously. That dual-engine structure gives the DAO flexibility on how it manages the V3-to-V4 transition, letting users migrate at their own pace rather than under deadline pressure.
Source: Crypto Briefing
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