Aave has officially launched its V4 upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet, marking a significant advancement in decentralized lending protocols. The launch follows more than two years of development and introduces a revolutionary modular design aimed at improving crypto lending, risk control, and capital efficiency for users globally.
The core innovation of Aave V4 is its Hub-and-Spoke architecture. This system separates liquidity storage (hubs) from autonomous lending markets (spokes). Three primary Ethereum hubs—Core, Prime, and Plus—act as central resource managers and policy enforcers. Individual spokes can establish their own risk rules and collateral terms, enabling diverse lending markets like fixed-rate loans and real-world asset (RWA) financing to operate independently. This design lowers systemic risk and enhances capital utilization compared to the previous isolated pool model.
Concurrently, Certora and Aave Labs revealed the comprehensive security model developed for Aave V4. Their six-year collaboration saw Certora integrated into the development process over a year before launch. The security work included continuous formal verification, adversarial testing, and manual audits by specialists in lending protocols, oracles, and governance. In total, the Certora team reviewed 169 smart contracts, analyzed over 51,000 lines of code, generated more than 800 formal verification rules, and prevented 28 critical vulnerabilities before deployment. An external security contest with independent researchers identified no critical or high-impact vulnerabilities.
"Security can no longer depend on one-off audits," stated Mooly Sagiv, founder and chief scientist at Certora. The firm reported that in 2025 alone, it contributed to protecting $196.5 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL) across DeFi and prevented over 720 vulnerabilities from reaching production.
The initial launch features a cautious rollout with safe limits on borrowing and supply. Supported assets include USDT, USDC, EURC, XAUt, and cbBTC, alongside partner assets from Lido and EtherFi. The upgrade also incorporates Chainlink's oracle infrastructure, which already secures billions in V3.
Key new features include improved risk-based pricing (where interest rates are tied to collateral quality), a more equitable liquidation system that sells only the necessary collateral, and a reinvestment module that allows idle hub funds to be deployed in low-risk yield strategies. A new interface, Aave Pro, is designed for advanced users and institutional investors, facilitating management of positions across hubs and spokes and supporting lending against real-world assets.
