Aave governance is considering a proposal to wind down the lending protocol's V3 markets on six blockchains and retire dozens of underutilized token listings, a cleanup that would affect $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt. Aave is one of DeFi's largest lending protocols by total value locked, and the scope of the wind-down reflects how aggressively the protocol expanded across emerging networks during the 2023–2024 multichain push—only to find that usage on many of those chains failed to materialize sustainably.

Risk service provider LlamaRisk, collaborating with other Aave service providers, has recommended offboarding 50 low-use reserves along with 21 matured Pendle principal token listings across 11 deployments. The proposal also calls for retiring all 25 reserves on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos. Balance figures were measured on July 28.

An ARFC (Aave Request for Comments) serves as a detailed proposal and precursor to an Aave Improvement Proposal (AIP); it does not by itself constitute proof of a completed final on-chain vote or execution.

Aptos Exit Follows Recent Launch

The proposed Aptos departure comes approximately 11 months after Aave launched its V3 market on the network. According to LlamaRisk, available liquidity on Aptos declined 94% over six months, with quarterly revenue falling below $1,000.

Every reserve on Scroll, zkSync, Metis, and Soneium had already been frozen, while Sonic and Aptos remained active and are now recommended for freezing.

A temperature check on Aave's multichain strategy concluded on December 5, 2025, with 923,400 votes in favor and under 1% opposed. The vote supported increasing the reserve factor on underperforming instances, shutting down instances on zkSync, Metis, and Soneium, and establishing a $2 million annual revenue floor for new instance deployments. That revenue threshold gives Aave a concrete, quantifiable benchmark for evaluating whether a chain deployment justifies its operational and security overhead going forward.

Scroll was subsequently added to the affected protocols through an accelerated process in April. LlamaRisk filed a direct-to-AIP proposal to freeze every Scroll reserve and raise selected reserve factors, describing the action as completing Scroll's deprecation following a rapid deterioration in network liquidity and Aave market activity.

Updated Risk Framework

Aave published an updated risk framework on June 9, covering asset, bridge, monitoring, and chain risk, along with criteria for winding down reserves or deployments. This month's announcement indicated de facto adoption of those rules by the protocol. The framework formalizes what had previously been a more ad hoc process for evaluating when a deployment or asset listing no longer merits its risk exposure—a question that has become pressing as DeFi activity has consolidated around a smaller set of high-liquidity networks.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov said in a Thursday post that the changes will also "reduce Aave's economic and technical risk surface as part of the new Aave Risk Framework and Technical Asset Listing Framework."

However, this is not a reversal of Aave's multichain expansion strategy, but rather a strategic refocusing on select protocols. "Aave will continue applying continuous risk assessment for all assets across all deployments," Kulechov said. The comments also follow Aave's launch on Avalanche earlier this month.