Aave | Crypto

The response to the DeFi recovery fund has quickly extended beyond Aave, and in some cases began with direct outreach.

AAVE, the native token of the Aave DeFi platform, is now available on the Solana blockchain network. The move will give Solana users access to one of the largest lending protocols in decentralized finance without leaving the network. This came less than two days after the Solana Foundation revealed that it would deploy part of […] The post Latest $290M exploit hit DeFi so hard it forced Aave onto Solana as part of rescue efforts appeared first on CryptoSlate.

More than $21 million in contributions has been made to the "DeFi United" relief effort so far, with another $215 million to be potentially allocated if certain governance proposals succeed. Aave Labs has proposed that the decentralized autonomous organization behind Arbitrum unfreeze $73.5 million in Ether tied to the Kelp DAO attack and to direct those funds to “DeFi United,” a fund aimed at restoring rsETH and compensating its holders. Last week, the Arbitrum Security Council moved to freeze 30,765 Ether (ETH) held in a wallet connected to the $293 million Kelp exploit.  In a proposal posted Saturday on the Arbitrum governance forum, Aave Labs said directing those funds to a planned remediation effort would “restore normal conditions for Arbitrum users” and the wider ecosystem and that the Ether on Arbitrum “represents a material contribution” toward restoring the Kelp DAO restaked ETH (rsETH) token. Read more

Blockchain analytics platform Arkham said that the largest contributors are Mantle and Aave DAO, having raised a combined $127 million.

Industry players are coordinating a recovery effort as the year's biggest crypto theft rattled Aave, with Lido and EtherFi being firsts to offer aid.

Aave’s supplied balance has tanked since the Kelp DAO bridge exploit, as users pull funds amid uncertainty over how much of the rsETH-linked shortfall the protocol will ultimately absorb. Aave, the largest decentralized lending protocol, has seen around $15 billion in deposits withdrawn since the Kelp Dao exploit on Saturday.  Total value supplied to Aave fell from $45.8 billion on Saturday to $30.8 billion on Wednesday, according to Aavescan data. The decline followed an attack that drained about 116,500 restaked Ether (rsETH), worth roughly $293 million, from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered rsETH bridge. The exploiter then used part of the stolen funds to borrow on Aave. Read more

Funds leaving Aave are splitting across safer lending, simpler ETH exposure and off-chain yield, with stablecoins acting as a temporary refuge.

Aave published a report outlining two possible outcomes: around $123 million in losses if damage is shared across all rsETH, or up to $230 million if confined to Layer 2s, with the final impact depending on how Kelp DAO allocates the shortfall.

LayerZero said that Kelp’s DVN setup allowed the $290 million exploit, as investors questioned which protocol would step up to cover the shortfall. Interoperability protocol LayerZero claims that an inadequate setup tied to Kelp’s decentralized verifier network (DVN) enabled malicious actors to steal $290 million from Kelp DAO, adding that preliminary signs point to North Korea-linked threat actors. An attacker drained about 116,500 Restaked ETH (rsETH), worth as much as $293 million at the time, from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered rsETH bridge on Saturday. LayerZero said Monday that the exploit stemmed from a single point of failure in Kelp’s setup, which relied on a single LayerZero DVN as the only verified path, despite LayerZero previously advising them against this. Read more

The AAVE token fell 16% and deposits fled the protocol after attackers used drained rsETH as collateral to borrow wrapped ether, leaving Aave to quantify how much bad debt it is now carrying.

Aptos (APT), up 3.8% since Tuesday, joined Aave (AAVE) as a top performer.

Aave commands DeFi lending, with DefiLlama showing $24.51 billion in total value locked and $17.526 billion in borrowed funds. The margin against Morpho, its closest rival, is roughly 4.1 times. Spark, the third-largest competitor, sits at $967.52 million in borrowed funds. Aave ended 2025 with 61.5% active loan market share and 52.4% lending TVL share, […] The post Aave’s $25 billion lending empire faces a real test as key contributors exit appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A key sticking point is Aave’s V4 upgrade, which introduces a new architecture and significantly expands the scope of risk management.

A Bank of Canada staff paper found Aave V3 avoided bad debt in 2024, but said the model pushed losses onto borrowers during liquidations. A Bank of Canada staff paper found that Aave V3 reported zero non-performing loans in 2024, with overcollateralization and automated liquidations helping prevent lender losses in its Ethereum lending market. Using transaction-level data from Jan. 27, 2023, to May 6, 2025, the study found that positions were typically liquidated before collateral values fell below outstanding debt, helping contain lender losses across the sample. But the model came with a tradeoff, the paper said. While it protected lenders from unrecovered losses, it also shifted risk onto borrowers and constrained capital efficiency compared with traditional lending systems. Read more

The upgrade has been in development for about two years and is designed to make it easier to use Aave for a wider range of lending and borrowing activities.

The rollout includes Aave Pro for advanced users and integrates Chainlink to provide oracle data for V4 markets. Decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform Aave has launched its V4 protocol on Ethereum after a binding onchain governance vote cleared its deployment.  On Monday, Aave announced the launch of its V4 protocol on Ethereum, introducing infrastructure designed to “expand onchain markets into real-world credit markets.” The company said this includes structured lending, fixed-rate borrowing and tokenized asset-backed credit. The rollout follows a Snapshot vote that gained near-unanimous support for a subsequent Aave Improvement Proposal (AIP), a binding onchain vote that opened on March 26 and closed on Sunday. The proposal passed with about 433,000 votes in favor, or roughly 60%, versus about 282,000 votes against, or nearly 40%. Read more

X hires former Aave chief product officer and Base design lead Benji Taylor as head of design, as the company prepares to roll out its X Money payments product. Elon Musk’s X has hired crypto-native product designer Benji Taylor as its new head of design, ahead of a wider rollout of the platform’s X Money payments product next month.  Taylor announced the move on X on Wednesday, saying he was “honoured” to join the company and looking forward to working closely with Musk and X’s head of product Nikita Bier. Taylor’s crypto-native background is notable, previously founding Los Feliz Engineering, a consumer software studio that was acquired by decentralized lending protocol Aave Labs in 2023. Bier said that he had followed Taylor’s work for years and knew that he was “on track to become one of the best designers in the world,” and that X was “finally teaming up and building the greatest design team in the industry.” Read more

Aave founder Stani Kulechov says the proposal will move to a binding onchain vote to formalize V4’s deployment on Ethereum. Aave’s decentralized autonomous organization backed a proposal to move its V4 protocol toward deployment on Ethereum mainnet, signaling broader support for the upgrade after weeks of governance tension and contributor exits. On Monday, the proposal to deploy Aave V4 on the Ethereum mainnet garnered near-unanimous support from the DAO, with more than 645,000 votes in favor and less than one vote against, and no abstentions, according to data from the offchain voting platform Snapshot. The vote marks a shift from earlier divisions within the Aave community, signaling broad alignment around the protocol’s direction as it moves toward formalizing V4’s deployment. Read more

A small pricing error in wstETH collateral caused $27 million in Aave liquidations, highlighting the critical role of price oracles and automated risk systems in DeFi. A temporary 2.85% pricing discrepancy in wstETH collateral triggered about $27 million in liquidations on Aave, showing how even small technical issues can have major financial consequences in automated DeFi lending systems. The liquidation wave occurred because Aave’s system briefly valued wstETH at about 1.19 ETH instead of its market value near 1.23 ETH, making some borrowing positions appear undercollateralized. Price oracles are critical infrastructure in DeFi because they feed external market data to smart contracts, determining collateral values, loan health and when automated liquidations should occur. Read more

In a post-mortem of the incident, Aave clarified it was not slippage, but an illiquid market that caused the trader to lose over $50 million while swapping USDT for AAVE. Decentralized finance protocol Aave said it is introducing a new feature to block swaps with a price impact above 25% after a user lost $50 million in a trade while interacting with Aave’s interface last week.  “We are soon deploying a new feature, Aave Shield, which provides more protections for users who use the swap feature in the Aave interface aave.com,” Aave said in a post-mortem statement on Saturday. Aave said users would need to manually disable the Aave Shield protection feature to proceed with high-risk trades. Read more