Aave founder Stani Kulechov has clarified that the protocol's recent decision to decommission dozens of low-adoption assets and six blockchain deployments is strictly a risk-management exercise and should not be interpreted as a statement on the viability of any Layer 1 or Layer 2 network.

In a post on social media platform X, Kulechov explained that the goal is to shrink Aave's operational, technical, and economic risk surface so the decentralized lending protocol can concentrate on higher-impact priorities, including growing existing high-value markets and expanding into securities finance. The wind-downs come amid a broader industry trend of major DeFi protocols reassessing the cost-benefit of maintaining long-tail assets and multi-chain footprints as the operational burden of supporting price oracles, liquidation infrastructure, and monitoring across dozens of markets has grown.

The recent low adoption asset and network wind-downs on Aave should not be interpreted as a view on any L1 or L2. The goal is simply to reduce Aave's operational, technical, and economic risk surface so we can focus on higher-impact priorities such as growing existing high value…
— Stani (@StaniKulechov) July 30, 2026

The proposal, prepared by risk service provider LlamaRisk, recommends offboarding 50 low-adoption reserves and 21 matured Pendle Principal Tokens across 11 Aave V3 deployments. It also calls for the full wind-down of six smaller deployments—Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos—which together cover an additional 25 reserves. In total, the initiative would affect approximately $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt. These figures represent a modest fraction of Aave's total value locked, which ranks it among the largest decentralized lending protocols in DeFi. The proposals remain subject to approval by Aave's governance token holders before taking effect.

Kulechov emphasized that Layer 2 networks remain critical to Ethereum's user experience, citing Aave App's Stable Vaults, which use a Layer 2 as an accounting layer to onboard mainstream users into decentralized finance. He also noted that networks such as Avalanche play an important role in bringing real-world assets (RWAs) on-chain through institutional channels.

After a comprehensive review, Aave is deprecating 50 low adoption asset reserves across multiple deployments. In addition, Aave is orderly winding down deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos, covering another 25 asset reserves. As part of this process,…
— Stani (@StaniKulechov) July 30, 2026

Governance Overhaul Follows KelpDAO Exploit

The reserve review is the first major exercise under Aave's newly proposed Risk Framework, which was introduced in June following the roughly $292 million KelpDAO bridge exploit. That incident exposed the protocol to potential bad debt after stolen rsETH was deposited as collateral, prompting a shift from reactive risk management to a standardized, portfolio-wide approach. Under the new framework, assets and deployments that no longer justify the overhead of maintaining price oracles, liquidation infrastructure, and continuous monitoring are flagged for removal.

For affected reserves, Aave plans to freeze new deposits and borrows, reduce supply and borrow caps to one unit, and raise reserve factors on borrowable assets. Deployments slated for full retirement would see reserve factors increased to 99% and base interest rates hiked to encourage users to unwind positions.

A companion proposal from LlamaRisk also targets long-tail reserves with elevated Chainlink price-feed risk, proposing to replace live feeds with fixed-price adapters.