Aave, the largest decentralized lending protocol, has unveiled one of its most ambitious cleanup efforts to date. Founder Stani Kulechov announced a governance proposal on July 30, 2026, to retire dozens of low-adoption asset reserves and wind down deployments on six smaller blockchain networks. Prepared by risk provider LlamaRisk under the newly introduced Aave Risk Framework, the initiative targets approximately $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt.
The proposal calls for offboarding 50 low-adoption reserves and 21 matured Pendle Principal Tokens across 11 Aave V3 deployments, representing $85.3 million in supplied assets and $11.5 million in debt. Additionally, entire deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos are slated for full retirement, contributing another $12.8 million in supplied assets and $4.1 million in debt. These six chains have seen dramatic deposit declines: Sonic’s deposits fell 74% over six months, Scroll’s 86%, zkSync’s 88%, and Aptos’s liquidity dropped 94%. LlamaRisk concluded that the revenue from these deployments no longer covers maintenance costs for price oracles, liquidation systems, and monitoring.
The cleanup follows Aave’s adoption in June of a new risk framework after the $292 million KelpDAO bridge exploit, which exposed potential bad debt from stolen collateral. Under the proposal, affected reserves would be frozen with supply and borrow caps reduced to one unit. For entire market closures, reserve factors would be raised to 99% and base interest rates to 5%, encouraging borrowers to repay and depositors to exit. Liquidation thresholds may be gradually lowered if positions persist. Once unwound, live price feeds would be replaced with fixed-price oracles. The plan remains subject to DAO approval through the standard governance process.
Aave’s native token traded at $95.52, down 2.75% over 24 hours at the time of the announcement. The protocol holds approximately $14.5 billion in total value locked across 23 chains.
