Aave Moves to Retire 50 Low-Adoption Assets, Wind Down Six Chains

Aave, the largest DeFi lending protocol with $14.3 billion in deposits, is moving to deprecate 50 low-adoption asset reserves and fully wind down its deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos, under a governance proposal posted Wednesday by risk provider LlamaRisk.

The changes touch $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt, or less than 1% of the protocol's deposits, according to DefiLlama. The individual removals cover 50 reserves plus 21 matured Pendle principal tokens across eleven deployments, holding $85.3 million of supply. The six whole-market shutdowns add 25 reserves and $12.8 million.

"After a comprehensive review, Aave is deprecating 50 low adoption asset reserves across multiple deployments," founder Stani Kulechov said on X early Thursday.

Hours later, he added that the move "should not be interpreted as a view on any L1 or L2. The goal is simply to reduce Aave's operational, technical, and economic risk surface so we can focus on higher-impact priorities such as growing existing high value markets and expanding to securities finance."

AAVE traded at $98.61, up 0.5% in the past 24 hours, roughly in line with Bitcoin's 1.1% gain, per CoinGecko.

Freeze, Then Squeeze

The proposal, an Aave Request for Final Comment that precedes a binding onchain vote, doesn't shut markets abruptly. Each reserve is frozen, supply and borrow caps drop to 1, and reserve factors rise (to 99% on the six retiring deployments, alongside a 5% base borrow rate) so suppliers earn less, withdraw, and borrowers repay. LlamaRisk applies the same treatment market-wide on the six chains being retired.

The numbers behind the whole-market exits are stark. Deposits on Sonic fell 74% over six months to $7.6 million; Scroll’s dropped 86% to $2.2 million; zkSync’s fell 88% to $844,000; Soneium’s declined 95% to $173,000. Each generates under $5,000 per quarter in protocol revenue, LlamaRisk wrote, below the cost of maintaining oracles, monitoring, and operational support.

The biggest individual positions in scope are two Bitcoin liquid-staking wrappers on Ethereum, FBTC and eBTC, which hold a combined $16.3 million after supplied balances collapsed from roughly $72 million six months ago. Bridged tokens including USDC.e and USDbC are removed where native versions exist, and MaticX is wound down because issuer Stader is sunsetting the token.

A companion proposal posted the same day offboards reserves flagged for Chainlink price feed risk, including LUSD, FRAX and RPL on Ethereum.

Pruning While Growing

The cleanup lands as Aave's newest deployment pulls in the opposite direction: the protocol said Wednesday that Aave V4 deposits nearly doubled over the past month, with caps raised for the eleventh time. Kulechov framed the deprecations as housekeeping under the protocol's new Risk Framework, which sets usage thresholds each listed asset must justify against its fixed operational load.

The ARFC still needs an onchain vote before any reserve is formally retired.