Leading decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Aave has achieved a remarkable milestone, hitting $10 billion in active loans.
It marks a 300% rise in lending activity from the start of the year when the figure stood at $3.4 billion.
DeFi Renaissance
Data from the on-chain DeFi tracking platform Token Terminal shows that in the last 30 days, active loans on the platform increased by 16.4% to reach $10.04 billion. At the same time, its total value locked (TVL), which is the overall value of crypto deposited on the protocol, went up by 26.7% to $15.96 billion.
Looking at other metrics, fees are up 48% to $40.34 million, annualized to over $490 million, which is a 33% improvement over the last 30 days. This has pushed monthly revenue by 82% to $9.36 million. Similarly, annualized revenue projections now stand at $113.84 million. This uptick has boosted Aave’s earnings, which have increased 1,628% over the last 30 days.
Additionally, there are currently nearly 173,000 token holders, a slight 0.9% increase from the previous month. The figure has been boosted by a more than 40% increase in daily active users in that period, numbering over 6,200 per day and nearly 30,000 per week.
As noted by Aave founder Stani Kulechov, the protocol’s explosive growth is a reflection of DeFi’s broader “renaissance.”
Aave’s Expanding Ecosystem
Beyond its core lending activities, Aave is looking to explore new frontiers, including a possible deployment on Spiderchain, a Bitcoin layer-2 network designed by Botanix Labs. The potential integration would combine Bitcoin’s deep liquidity with Aave’s lending ecosystem, enabling Ethereum-based applications to interact with BTC assets.
According to reports, the Aave-Chain Initiative (ACI) is currently seeking feedback from its community on the proposal. If successful, it could further solidify the platform’s leadership within DeFi.
In October, President-elect Donald Trump’s fledgling DeFi project, World Liberty Financial (WLF), issued a proposal to Aave to establish an instance on the platform. The proposal contained an offer of 20% of all protocol fees as well as 7% of the supply of WLF’s governance token, WLFI.
In the same month, Aave saw a rise in deposits of Coinbase’s wrapped Bitcoin offering, cbBTC, with 56% of the cryptocurrency housed there.
However, despite the platform’s latest triumph, its native AAVE token is 3.4% below its level from 24 hours ago. Additionally, across seven days, it lost over 12% of its value, reflecting a marked underperformance against the global crypto market, which is up 4.90%.
Nonetheless, over the last three months, AAVE has been up 31.7% while also gaining a whopping 81% in the last six months.