Aave is proposing to wind down six low-activity blockchain deployments and prune 50 weakly used reserves, a cleanup meant to cut overhead and focus the protocol on higher-value markets.
- Six networks targeted: Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos
- Cleanup scope: 50 reserves and 21 matured Pendle principal tokens
- Status: still at the ARFC stage, so nothing is final yet
On July 30, Aave founder Stani Kulechov said the protocol plans to retire dozens of low-use asset reserves and wind down deployments on six blockchain networks. The proposal covers roughly $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in debt, but it is still only a governance proposal. Under Aave’s process, it would need to pass an off-chain Snapshot vote, then a formal Aave Governance Process Document v1, and finally an on-chain vote before any shutdowns are executed.
The broad idea is simple: stop paying to maintain markets that barely get used. DeFi loves to celebrate expansion, but expansion without real activity is just operational clutter with a fancier label. Eventually, the bill shows up.
The six deployments named in the proposal hold about $12.8 million in combined supply and $4.1 million in debt. Sonic is the biggest of the group, with $7.6 million supplied and $2.7 million borrowed, but even there deposits have reportedly fallen 74% over six months.
The rest look even weaker. Scroll deposits declined 86% to $2.2 million, zkSync fell 88% to $844, 000, Metis dropped to $297, 000, Soneium fell to $173, 000, and Aptos liquidity declined 94% over six months, leaving $1.7 million supplied and $719, 000 borrowed. In plain English, these are not busy lending markets. They are mostly ghosts with dashboards.
The cleanup is not limited to entire chains. Aave is also targeting another 50 low-adoption reserves and 21 matured Pendle principal tokens across 11 deployments. Those assets account for about $85.3 million in supplied assets and $11.5 million in debt.
Among the larger affected positions are FBTC and eBTC wrappers on Ethereum, which together represent about $16.3 million in supply and roughly $63, 000 in borrowing. For readers less familiar with the jargon, these are tokenized positions tied to bitcoin-related exposure, not native BTC itself.
A reserve in Aave is simply an asset market where users can supply tokens and borrow against them. A wind down means the protocol would close a market gradually instead of pulling the plug overnight. That distinction matters. Orderly exits are annoying; chaotic ones are how protocols earn a bad reputation.
The proposed shutdown process is staged. Affected reserves would first be frozen, and supply and borrowing caps would be reduced to effectively zero. Existing positions could remain open, but users would no longer be able to make new deposits, borrow more funds, or use those assets as fresh collateral.
That gives users a path out rather than a trapdoor. It also shows Aave trying to manage risk like a grown-up protocol, which is refreshing in a sector that often confuses “decentralized” with “good luck, peasant.”
For markets that still have loans outstanding, the proposal says Aave would raise the reserve factor, meaning a larger share of interest would go to the protocol rather than suppliers. In full-market closures, the plan uses a 99% reserve factor and a 5% base borrowing rate, making the market unattractive to borrow from while helping it unwind. If borrowers still sit on their hands, risk managers could raise borrowing rates further.
There is also a risk-control backstop. If remaining collateral positions create too much exposure, liquidation thresholds may be reduced gradually. Once positions have unwound, Aave plans to replace live price feeds with fixed-price oracles before retiring the markets altogether. In simple terms, that means the market stops relying on active pricing once normal trading has dried up, which helps avoid weird distortions in thin markets.
The proposal also tells a bigger story about where Aave is heading. The protocol remains the largest decentralized lending platform, with about $14.5 billion in total value locked across 23 chains, but the center of gravity is shifting. Aave is concentrating resources on Aave V4, institutional markets, and higher-use deployments, and the DAO has already approved $25 million in funding to support that strategy.
That fits the direction Aave Labs has been signaling elsewhere. Recent governance and strategy work has pointed toward a more institutional model, including securities-backed lending, repo, and securities lending. That is a much bigger opportunity than keeping a bunch of sleepy sidechains on life support. Aave aims to rebuild securities finance on V4.
It also helps explain why cleanup is becoming a priority. Supporting marginal deployments costs money and engineering bandwidth. Price feeds, monitoring, risk parameters, and governance overhead all add up, and low-volume markets rarely earn their keep. In that sense, pruning dead weight is not retreat. It is discipline.
Still, it would be lazy to call this a full multichain surrender. Aave has continued to consider new deployments when the numbers make sense, including Deploy Aave v3 on Mantle after DAO approval. So the better read is not that Aave is abandoning multichain expansion, but that it is becoming far more selective about where it shows up.
That is probably the right move. Early DeFi was all about being everywhere, all at once, with a lot of swagger and not always much revenue. Mature DeFi has to ask harder questions: Which markets actually matter? Which ones justify the risk? Which ones are just expensive vanity plates?
Why does this matter? Because unused markets do not just sit there harmlessly. They add operational burden, expand the attack surface, and waste resources that could go toward more active and more useful products. Shutting them down is boring, but boring is often what keeps protocols from getting sloppy.
Will users get blindsided? The proposal is built to avoid that. Freezing reserves, lowering caps, and allowing existing positions to remain open gives suppliers and borrowers time to unwind instead of forcing a sudden exit.
Key questions and takeaways
-
Is Aave shutting down these chains right now?
No. This is still an ARFC, or Aave Request for Comment, which means it must go through more governance steps before any closure happens. -
Which networks are affected?
The six deployments named are Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos. -
What happens to users with open positions?
Existing positions could stay open for now, but new deposits, additional borrowing, and fresh collateral use would be blocked once the reserves are frozen. -
Why is Aave doing this?
The protocol appears to be trimming low-activity markets so it can focus on more important deployments, Aave’s $63M Expansion to Sonic, and institutional-oriented products that justify the overhead. -
Is Aave leaving multichain behind?
Not exactly. The cleanup suggests a more selective multichain strategy, not a total retreat. Aave still appears willing to expand where there is real activity and strategic value.
Aave’s proposal is not flashy, and that is exactly why it matters. Crypto has spent years pretending that more chains, more markets, and more integrations automatically equal progress. Sometimes real progress is just cutting loose the dead weight before it starts dragging the whole system down.
