Aave Price Tracker (AAVE) & Whale Tracker

What is Aave

Aave is the largest lending protocol in decentralised finance. Users deposit crypto to earn interest and borrow against it without a bank, a credit check or a counterparty: the smart contracts hold the collateral, set the rates and liquidate loans that fall below their thresholds. Stani Kulechov launched it in 2017 as ETHLend, a peer-to-peer lending marketplace, and relaunched it in January 2020 as Aave, a pooled-liquidity protocol whose name means ghost in Finnish.

AAVE is the governance token. Holders vote on which assets the protocol accepts, how risk parameters are set and how the treasury is spent, and they can stake AAVE as a backstop that absorbs losses in a shortfall. The protocol has held tens of billions of dollars in deposits and has never suffered a loss of user funds from a contract exploit. The live price, market cap and supply at the top of this page refresh automatically.

Aave Labs, Kulechov's company, builds the software; the Aave DAO owns and governs the protocol.

How Aave works

Each asset has a pool. Depositors receive aTokens that grow in balance as interest accrues; borrowers draw from the pool up to a loan-to-value ratio set per asset and pay a variable rate that rises as the pool's utilisation rises. If a borrower's collateral falls below the liquidation threshold, anyone can repay part of the loan and take the collateral at a discount, which keeps the pools solvent without a central risk desk.

Aave introduced flash loans, which let anyone borrow any amount with no collateral as long as the loan is repaid within the same transaction. They are used for arbitrage, collateral swaps and liquidations, and they became a staple of DeFi. Version 3, launched in 2022, added isolation mode for riskier assets, efficiency mode for correlated assets such as stablecoins, and deployments on a dozen networks.

GHO, Aave's own stablecoin, launched in July 2023 and is minted by borrowers against their collateral, with interest flowing to the DAO. The Umbrella system, introduced in 2025, replaced the original safety module with staked aTokens that cover each asset's bad debt directly.

Supply and tokenomics

AAVE has a maximum supply of 16 million tokens. The original LEND token was swapped at a hundred to one in 2020, creating 13 million AAVE, with a further three million placed in an ecosystem reserve controlled by governance. Most of the supply has been in circulation for years, so there are no large unlocks.

The token earns through staking: AAVE staked in the backstop receives rewards from the reserve and, since 2025, from protocol revenue. The Aavenomics proposal approved that year began using treasury income to buy back AAVE on the open market at a rate of around a million dollars a week, and set up a revenue-sharing structure for stakers. Interest spreads, GHO borrowing fees and flash-loan fees are the DAO's income.

History and milestones

ETHLend raised about 16 million dollars in a 2017 token sale and struggled as a peer-to-peer market. The 2020 pivot to pooled lending arrived just before the DeFi summer, and Aave's flash loans and rate switching won it deposits from Compound, the incumbent. Version 2 came in December 2020 and AAVE reached its all-time high above 660 dollars in May 2021.

The protocol expanded across Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and others with version 3, and survived the 2022 crashes without bad debt beyond a small CRV position that the DAO covered. GHO launched in 2023, the Aave Labs team shipped version 3.2 and 3.3 upgrades, and in 2025 deposits passed 40 billion dollars as Ethena's sUSDe loops, tokenised Treasuries and institutional users arrived. The Aavenomics buybacks began in April 2025, and Aave Horizon opened a market for tokenised real-world assets with institutional partners.

What people use Aave for

Earning yield on idle assets is the simplest use: deposit stablecoins or ether and collect a floating rate paid by borrowers. Borrowing is the second: holders who do not want to sell their bitcoin or ether borrow stablecoins against it for spending or for leverage, and traders loop positions to amplify staking or yield returns.

Protocols build on Aave as infrastructure. Ethena, Pendle, Morpho vaults, wallets and exchanges route liquidity through its pools, and GHO serves as a stablecoin that pays its interest to the DAO. For AAVE holders, staking and buybacks connect the token to the protocol's revenue.

Where to buy and trade Aave

AAVE is listed on Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, OKX, Bybit and most other exchanges against the dollar and major stablecoins. Grayscale's Aave trust and European exchange-traded products offer brokerage exposure.

AAVE is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum with versions on the chains where the protocol runs. Uniswap and Balancer trade it on-chain, and MetaMask, Rabby and hardware wallets hold it. Staking is done through the Aave app; note the cooldown period before unstaking.

Risks to understand

Aave's contracts have a long safety record, but the protocol's risk is in its collateral: a sudden crash, a depegged stablecoin or an oracle failure can leave bad debt that stakers absorb. Governance decisions about which assets to list are the main source of risk, and the DAO has had close calls.

Competition from Morpho, Spark and exchange lending desks is growing, and regulation of DeFi lending remains unsettled. AAVE is volatile and fell more than 90 percent from its 2021 high before recovering. This page is a reference for the data above, not investment advice.

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