Aave to exit six chains, remove $98.1M from 71 markets

Aave founder Stani Kulechov has backed a governance proposal to exit six blockchains and remove 71 low‑use markets that together hold $98.1 million in deposits and $15.6 million in outstanding debt. The proposal would narrow the protocol’s multichain footprint and concentrate resources on larger, higher‑activity markets.

The plan recommends removing 50 individual asset reserves and 21 matured Pendle principal tokens across 11 deployments, and calls for a full wind‑down of Aave markets on Sonic, Scroll, Aptos, zkSync, Metis and Soneium. Under the proposal, affected reserves would be frozen and supply and borrowing caps reduced to nominal levels to limit ongoing exposure while users withdraw funds.

For markets with active loans, reserve factors and interest rates would be raised to increase borrowing costs and accelerate repayments. Many of the targeted reserves are already frozen or have sharply lowered deposit and borrowing limits.

Governance materials cite fixed per‑asset costs such as oracle maintenance, risk monitoring and liquidation infrastructure. On several smaller networks revenue has fallen below the cost of supporting the deployments.

The six smaller network deployments contain 25 reserves with about $12.8 million of deposits and $4.1 million of debt, split across Sonic ($7.6 million), Scroll ($2.2 million), Aptos ($1.7 million), zkSync ($0.8 million), Metis ($0.3 million) and Soneium ($0.2 million). The remaining removals account for roughly $85.3 million in supplied assets and $11.5 million in borrowings, bringing the totals to $98.1 million in supply and $15.6 million in outstanding debt.

Kulechov described the action as “a comprehensive review” intended to reduce the protocol’s “economic and technical risk surface.” He added that assessments are ongoing and cautioned the wind‑downs should not be interpreted as a negative judgment on any layer‑1 or layer‑2 chain, noting that layer‑2 networks remain important for consumer‑facing Ethereum applications and pointing to Avalanche’s work on tokenized real‑world assets.

Aave remains the largest decentralized lending protocol by total value locked, holding about $14.5 billion across 23 blockchains. The governance changes follow updated risk and technical listing frameworks that require ongoing monitoring and provide a mechanism to reconsider assets or entire deployments when activity, liquidity or infrastructure no longer meet protocol standards.

If the proposal is adopted, resources would shift away from low‑use deployments to established markets and to areas such as securities finance, while the targeted reserves would be wound down in an orderly way intended to allow withdrawals and reduce protocol overhead.