Aave isn’t just big for DeFi. It is the largest lending protocol in the sector by a mile, with more than $50 billion in assets deposited across its markets. That’s a balance sheet that would place it roughly in the top 50 U.S. banks by assets if it were a traditional institution.
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Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave and developer Aave Labs, has a straightforward version of what he’s building: “Aave will be the backbone of all credit,” he said. Not just leverage for crypto traders, but mortgages, credit cards, consumer and business loans, even government debt – with DeFi running quietly in the background.
The path there goes on two rails. On the consumer side, the upcoming Aave App, now listed on Apple’s App Store, aims to become a savings account for average investors. Users see an interface closer to a neobank; under the hood, deposits are fed into Aave’s onchain lending markets – a textbook “DeFi mullet” game, where a familiar, Web2 front end masks the complex blockchain and DeFi engine at the back end.
Then there is the institutional side and the booming real-world tokenized asset space. Aave’s Horizon, which debuted in August, offers regulated players a marketplace to borrow stablecoins on their tokenized assets 24/7 while staying within compliance lines. It has grown to a pool of around $600 million despite the crypto headwinds of recent months.
As the world migrates on-chain, and traditional financial rails and blockchain rails become increasingly intertwined, Aave is positioned to sit close to the center of that flow.
Most recently, Aave has found itself at the center of a governance dispute between token holders – participants in the protocol’s self-governing DAO – and Stabi Kulechov’s Aave Labs over control of key revenue streams and who ultimately has rights to core project assets such as the brand, trademarks and associated IP. It is not just about the parameters of the protocol on the chain, but the power that sits around it.
The consequences of the result go far beyond the protocol itself. How that conflict is resolved could define what governance tokens really grant holders in practice, setting a precedent across DeFi for protocol ownership and the boundary between decentralized governance and corporate governance.
