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Aave Proposes Governance-Led Clean‑Up to Remove 75 Low‑Use Markets and Exit Six Chains

The proposal aims to cut the protocol’s economic and technical risk by pruning uneconomical markets so Aave can focus on higher‑use deployments.

Overview

  • Aave founder Stani Kulechov announced on July 30 a formal governance proposal at the ARFC stage to deprecate 50 low‑adoption reserves, retire 21 matured Pendle principal tokens and close 25 reserves tied to six full deployments.
  • The package would affect roughly $98.1 million in supplied assets and about $15.6 million in outstanding debt across affected markets while the reserves and chains remain live pending DAO votes.
  • The six full‑market targets are Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos, each of which has seen steep deposit declines and generates negligible protocol revenue often under $5,000 per quarter.
  • If approved, the plan calls for orderly wind‑downs starting with freezes and cap cuts, then steep reserve‑factor hikes (up to 99% for whole‑market closures), a 5% base borrowing rate and replacement of live price feeds with fixed oracles to prompt voluntary exits.
  • Next steps require community feedback, an off‑chain Snapshot and a binding on‑chain vote by the Aave DAO and the move signals a strategic shift toward concentrating engineering and risk resources on Aave V4 and higher‑use markets.