Aave Crosses $1T in Lending Volume With Institutional Push

AAVE News

Decentralized lending protocol Aave has recorded over $1 trillion in cumulative lending volume, a first for the DeFi sector. Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov confirmed the milestone in an Xposton Wednesday, describing Aave as “the backbone of on-chain lending.”

The protocol currently holds $27.2 billion in total value locked and generated $83.3 million in fees over the past 30 days, which is nearly four times the fee revenue of its closest competitor, Morpho. Aave leads a field of DeFi lending protocols that each hold over $1 billion in TVL, including Morpho, JustLend, SparkLend, Maple, Kamino Lend, and Compound Finance.

Aave’s institutional expansion has been a deliberate part of its recent strategy. In August 2025, Aave Labs launched Aave Horizon, a lending market built on Ethereum specifically for traditional finance firms, allowing institutions to borrowstablecoinsagainst real-world assets. VanEck, WisdomTree, and Securitize were among the first to participate.

Kulechov, who originally launched the protocol as ETHLend in November 2017 before rebranding to Aave in September 2018, has outlined ambitions beyond DeFi’s current scope. On Feb. 15, he said that tokenizing “abundance assets” such as solar energy, battery storage, and robotics, assets he projects will be worth a combined $50 trillion by 2050, could significantly expand the addressable market for DeFi lending.

The milestone arrives alongside an internal governance dispute within the Aave community. Token holders have been asked to approve a package for Aave Labs valued at up to $42.5 million in stablecoins plus 75,000 AAVE tokens.

Under the proposed arrangement, Aave Labs would route all revenue generated from Aave-branded products into the Aave DAO treasury in exchange for the funding package. The proposal represents a shift toward a DAO-funded operating model, and has divided opinion among AAVE holders on how much financial control should sit with the Labs entity versus the decentralizedgovernance structure.

Kulechov said the longer-term goal is for Aave to become “the largest, most efficient liquidity network in the world,” one that banks, b

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