A new Aave governance proposal would shut the lending protocol’s V3 markets on six blockchains and retire dozens of underperforming token listings, covering $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt.
The more interesting part is the standard being applied. Aave now has a numeric revenue floor a blockchain deployment has to clear, and several of its existing markets are nowhere near it.
What the Proposal Covers
Risk service provider LlamaRisk, working alongside other Aave service providers, recommended offboarding 50 low-use reserves and 21 matured Pendle principal token listings across 11 deployments. The proposal also calls for retiring all 25 reserves on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos. Balances cited in the proposal were measured on July 28.
The submission is an Aave Request for Comment (ARFC), a detailed precursor to a formal Aave Improvement Proposal. It does not represent a completed onchain vote or executed action.
Aptos Exit Arrives Just 11 Months After Launch
The proposed Aptos wind-down is the most striking element of the cleanup. Aave launched its V3 market on Aptos 11 months ago. Available liquidity has since fallen 94% over six months, and quarterly revenue on the network has dropped below $1,000, according to LlamaRisk.
That last figure is worth pausing on. A lending market on a major blockchain generated less revenue in three months than the cost of a laptop. It is a rare, precisely measured picture of what an unsuccessful chain deployment looks like from the inside, and the sort of number that usually stays private.
Every reserve on Scroll, zkSync, Metis and Soneium was already frozen before this proposal was filed. Sonic and Aptos remained active and are now recommended for freezing.
The $2 Million Rule
This cleanup follows a sequence of earlier governance actions. A temperature check on Aave’s multichain strategy concluded on 5 December 2025, drawing 923,400 votes in favour with under 1% opposed. That vote backed raising reserve factors on underperforming instances, shutting down deployments on zkSync, Metis and Soneium, and setting a $2 million annual revenue floor for any new instance deployment.
The revenue floor is the substantive change. For most of DeFi’s multichain era, protocols deployed onto new blockchains largely because the chains wanted them there and because being everywhere looked like growth, with little public accounting of whether any given deployment earned its keep. A stated numeric threshold is a quiet admission that the previous approach had no bar at all, and it is a standard other protocols do not publish.
Scroll was subsequently added to the deprecation list in April through an accelerated direct-to-AIP process. LlamaRisk filed that proposal to freeze every Scroll reserve and raise selected reserve factors, citing rapid deterioration in network liquidity and Aave market activity.
Aave published an updated risk framework on 9 June covering asset, bridge, monitoring and chain risk, along with criteria for winding down reserves or deployments. A governance framework announcement this month indicated the protocol has de facto adopted those rules.
Founder Frames Move as Risk Reduction
Aave founder Stani Kulechov stated in a post on Thursday that the action will ‘reduce Aave’s economic and technical risk surface as part of the new Aave Risk Framework and Technical Asset Listing Framework.’
Kulechov was explicit that the wind-downs do not represent a retreat from multichain expansion. ‘Aave will continue applying continuous risk assessment for all assets across all deployments,’ he said. The comments come shortly after Aave launched on Avalanche earlier this month.
What It Means If You Have Funds There
Deprecation is an orderly process rather than a loss event. Freezing a reserve stops new borrowing and new supply while leaving existing positions withdrawable, so suppliers exit over time rather than being forced out. Anyone with assets in the affected markets should still plan to move them, because liquidity in a winding-down market thins as everyone else does the same.
There is a broader lesson for choosing where to put money onchain. Aptos went from a headline protocol launch to a proposed exit in under a year, and the warning sign was visible in the numbers well before the announcement, in collapsing liquidity and negligible revenue. Those figures are public for most deployments and are a better guide to whether a market is healthy than the launch announcement that started it.
The cleanup also sits inside a wider consolidation across crypto, with exchanges winding down and projects merging or closing. Aave’s version is the healthy form of it, a profitable protocol pruning what does not work while continuing to expand where it does.
