Aave Community Considers Proposal to Exit Polygon

The founder of Aave Chan, Marc Zeller, is proposing that Aave should exit the Polygon network, citing bridge vulnerabilities.

Zeller’s proposal directly responds to a recent Polygon governance proposal, advising it to direct the stablecoin reserves on its PoS bridge toward an incentivized program to grow its DeFi ecosystem.

According to Zeller, if Polygon decides to go ahead with the idea, it could have severe implications for Aave as Polygon would essentially redefine the risk profile of its bridged assets.

Zeller argues that bridge vulnerabilities have caused the largest losses in DeFi, such as the Ronin, BNB Bridge, and Wormhole hacks worth $634 million, $586 million, and $326 million, respectively.

“The Aave ecosystem has experienced both indirect and direct impacts from bridge vulnerabilities, notably the Multichain and Harmony bridge hacks. Additionally, depositing user funds into unsafe protocols has historically resulted in significant losses,” wrote Zeller.

To ensure an orderly unwinding of Aave’s Polygon markets, Zeller is proposing a five-point plan that includes seeking feedback from risk providers, designing a user position migration initiative with rewards to encourage migration from Polygon, inviting Layer 2s to participate in the migration initiative, migrating Aave Governance V3 to a more secure network and developing front-end migration tools.

Aave is the second-largest DeFi protocol on Ethereum, with a total value locked (TVL) of $20 billion, according to DeFiLlama data.