Aave proposes reserve deprecations affecting $98 million in supplied assets

Aave has proposed deprecating dozens of low-adoption asset reserves and winding down six blockchain deployments in a governance initiative that would affect approximately $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov announced the proposal Thursday. Prepared by risk service provider LlamaRisk, the changes follow a review conducted under the protocol's newly proposed Aave Risk Framework, with LlamaRisk applying the framework across deployments rather than reacting to any single asset.

The proposal recommends offboarding 50 low-adoption reserves and 21 matured Pendle Principal Tokens across 11 Aave V3 deployments, alongside the full wind-down of six smaller deployments — Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos — which cover another 25 reserves.

According to the proposal, the individual reserve removals account for $85.3 million in supplied assets and $11.5 million in debt, while the six deployment-wide deprecations represent an additional $12.8 million in supplied assets and $4.1 million in debt.

Rather than responding to a single incident, the review applies Aave's proposed portfolio-wide risk standards, removing reserves whose activity no longer justifies the operational overhead of maintaining price oracles, liquidation infrastructure, and ongoing risk monitoring.

The proposal also targets bridged assets that duplicate native token listings, matured Pendle PTs that no longer generate yield, and smaller deployments where protocol revenue no longer covers maintenance costs.

For affected reserves, Aave plans to freeze new activity, reduce supply and borrow caps to one unit, and raise reserve factors on borrowable assets. Entire deployments slated for retirement would also see reserve factors raised to 99% and base interest rates increased to encourage users to unwind positions.

Broader governance overhaul

The reserve review follows Aave's proposed risk framework introduced in June after the approximately $292 million KelpDAO bridge exploit, which exposed the protocol to potential bad debt after stolen rsETH was deposited as collateral.

Kulechov said at the time that the framework would become the standard governing asset listings, ongoing reviews, and future deprecations across Aave V3, V4, and Aave Horizon, with assets failing to meet the new requirements being removed from the protocol. A companion proposal from LlamaRisk targets a further group of long-tail reserves flagged for elevated Chainlink price-feed risk, replacing their live feeds with fixed-price adapters.

Aave’s token traded at $95.52, down 2.75% over the past 24 hours.