Aave Proposes Strategic Overhaul to Shutter Low-Revenue V3 Markets and Impose $2M Floor for New Deployments

The Aave community has introduced a tentative governance proposal titled "Focusing the Aave V3 Multichain Strategy," aiming to fundamentally reshape the protocol's cross-chain expansion approach. The plan responds to widening revenue gaps and unsustainable operational costs from maintaining numerous V3 instances across different blockchains.

Under the proposal, Aave would increase the reserve factor for networks with annual revenue below $3 million, which includes Polygon, Gnosis, BNB Chain, Optimism, Scroll, Sonic, and Celo. If these adjustments do not yield a significant revenue increase within 12 months, abandonment processes may be initiated on the affected chains.

More drastically, the proposal calls for a complete shutdown of Aave V3 on the three lowest-revenue networks: zkSync, Metis, and Soneium. These chains generate only between $3,000 and $50,000 annually, failing to cover engineering and maintenance costs. The community notes a lack of sufficient product-market fit on these platforms.

For all future expansions, the proposal sets a clear minimum annual revenue requirement of $2 million for any new chain deployment. This threshold is intended to prevent liquidity fragmentation and ensure that each new instance contributes meaningfully to Aave's ecosystem.

In related developments, Aave founder Stani Kulechov announced that ETHLend will return in 2026 with support for native Bitcoin lending, moving away from wrapped tokens. Additionally, Aave has launched the public testnet for V4, featuring a new Hub and Spoke architecture designed to improve capital efficiency and modularity.