In a governance initiative floated on Thursday, leading lending DeFi protocol Aave has proposed to deprecate reserves of several ‘low adoption’ digital assets. In tandem, the proposal also suggests winding down deployments on 6 blockchain networks.
Aave mulls deprecating asset reserves
According to the governance proposal shared by risk service provider LlamaRisk, the changes are being initiated after a review done by the newly formed Aave Risk Framework. The proposal argues that 50 low-adoption reserves and 21 matured Pendle Principal Tokens across 11 Aave V3 deployments should be offboarded.
In parallel, Aave should also discontinue support for 6 blockchain deployments – namely Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos. Notably, these networks hold an additional 25 asset reserves.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov made the announcement public in an X post. The Finnish entrepreneur said that “these measures reduce Aave’s economic and technical risk surface.”
Per the proposal details, the individual reserve removals account for $85.3 million in supplied assets and $11.5 million in debt. Meanwhile, the 6 deployment-wide deprecations represent an additional $12.8 million in supplied assets and $4.1 million in debt.
Kulechov added that the review is not periodical, and it aims to cut the tail risk associated with the operational costs of reserves and blockchains whose usage doesn’t justify the amount of capital being used to secure them.
Such operational overheads can easily cost millions of USD, as they include operational overhead of maintaining price oracles, liquidation infrastructure, and ongoing risk monitoring.
For asset reserves affected by the proposal, Aave plans to immediately freeze new activity, reduce supply and borrow caps to just 1 unit, and increase reserve factors on borrowable assets.
Aave TVL falls off a cliff
According to latest data from DefiLlama, Aave’s total value locked (TVL) has crashed from its October 2025 peak of around $45 billion to just about $14.35 billion as of July 2026. The following chart confirms the crash.
Although the protocol’s token rallied for a brief period of time after Aave V4 deployment, it failed to sustain the momentum. Meanwhile, the formation of a bearish head and shoulders pattern threatens a fall to $88 for the digital asset.
