Aave

AAVE is the governance token of Aave, a decentralised protocol where people lend and borrow crypto at interest.

Aave is a decentralised lending protocol: people deposit crypto into shared pools and earn interest, and others borrow from those pools against collateral and pay interest. It began in 2017 as ETHLend. The AAVE token replaced the older LEND token when the migration opened on 2 October 2020, at 100 LEND for 1 AAVE. Stani Kulechov founded the project and leads Aave Labs.

AAVE has a fixed supply of 16 million tokens: 13 million came from converting LEND and 3 million were created for the Ecosystem Reserve, which the community controls. About 15.4 million were circulating on 27 September 2026. Holders vote on changes to the protocol, and they can stake AAVE in the Safety Module (stkAAVE) to earn rewards and lower their borrowing rate on GHO, Aave's own stablecoin.

The protocol earns by keeping a share of the interest borrowers pay (the reserve factor), plus fees such as liquidation and flash-loan fees. Since April 2025 the Aave DAO has used this revenue to buy AAVE on the market. Buybacks were paused after a bridge exploit at Kelp DAO in April 2026 hit Aave markets, and Aave confirmed on 27 June 2026 that an automated version, Aavenomics 3.0, was live.

Aave runs on more than 20 blockchains and held about $19.3 billion of deposits on 27 September 2026. In December 2025 the US SEC closed a four-year investigation into the protocol without enforcement action, and Grayscale has filed to turn its Aave trust into a US exchange-traded fund.