Aave to Deprecate 50 Low-Adoption Assets, Exit Six Chains

Aave low-adoption asset deprecation is now official protocol policy, or close enough to it. DeFi's largest lending platform published a governance proposal on Wednesday that would shutter deployments across Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos, six chains that together can't scrape together $5,000 a quarter in protocol fees. The cleanup also sweeps up 21 matured Pendle Principal Tokens and dozens of other dead-weight asset markets. The proposal was drafted by risk adviser LlamaRisk, though Aave founder Stani Kulechov has already framed the cuts as a done deal.

The Numbers Behind Aave's Chain Purge

The numbers in the governance proposal don't leave much room for debate. Deposits on Soneium fell 95% over six months. Aptos liquidity dropped 94%. zkSync saw an 88% decline, Scroll lost 86% of its deposits, Metis dropped 79%, and Sonic shed 74%. What's left across these six chains isn't a lending market so much as a skeleton crew, thin liquidity, minimal activity, and no sign of a turnaround.

Three of the six chains, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos, now generate under $1,000 per quarter in protocol revenue. Not per month. Per quarter. That's roughly the cost of running oracle price feeds for a few days, nowhere near enough to cover monitoring systems, operational overhead, and the ongoing risk of maintaining live borrow and lend positions on a quiet chain. Aave operates across dozens of networks, and each deployment carries real maintenance costs regardless of whether anyone shows up to use it.

The six chains aren't the only targets. The proposal also covers 21 matured Pendle Principal Tokens, fixed-term instruments that have already reached their expiry dates and should have been cleaned up long ago. Pendle's structured yield products carry a natural sunset date; once they expire, keeping them listed in an active lending market serves no real purpose. Combined, the markets slated for deprecation hold $98.1 million in supplied assets against $15.6 million in outstanding debt. That's not trivial on paper, but spread across dead markets on six chains, it's a liquidity puddle in what used to be a lake.

The Aave low-adoption asset deprecation proposal was authored by LlamaRisk, a risk advisory firm partially funded by the Aave DAO. When whole markets get shut down rather than individual assets, it's because the entire deployment is underwater, the firm noted that aggregate activity on each of the six chains had fallen to a point where no amount of individual reserve management would fix the underlying problem.

On six smaller deployments the assessment applies to the whole market rather than individual reserves: aggregate activity has declined to a level where the revenue the deployment generates does not cover the cost of supporting it, so the entire market is wound down at once.

What Does the Aave Deprecation Plan Actually Do?

Aave isn't pulling the plug overnight. The shutdown mechanism is more surgical. Affected markets will be frozen, no new deposits, no new borrowing, no new collateral. Supply and borrow caps will drop to just one token per market. Existing positions survive. But the economics of staying in are about to get a lot worse.

Borrowers in the affected markets will face a new 5% base borrowing rate that raises the cost of their existing debt, while suppliers watch their yields collapse as 99% of the interest collected from those borrowers gets redirected into the Aave treasury rather than flowing back to lenders. Depositors have no reason to keep liquidity parked in a frozen market with near-zero returns. Borrowers face a rising cost of capital with no ability to open new positions. Eventually, both groups leave on their own, and Aave never has to force anyone out.

It's a clever mechanism, slightly cold-blooded, but structurally elegant. Aave isn't declaring insolvency on these markets. It's making them economically painful to inhabit, raising the cost of inaction until the market self-empties. Nobody gets liquidated by force. They just stop having any reason to stay.

The proposal is still pending a governance vote, but Kulechov's public framing of the cuts as already underway doesn't leave much suspense about the outcome. He cited "low adoption" as the driver, which is technically accurate but a bit generous. A 95% liquidity drop in six months isn't slow adoption. That's departure.

Zoom out and this is also a reckoning for the multi-chain DeFi expansion narrative. Over the past two years, landing an Aave deployment was treated as a legitimacy stamp for every new L2 and alt-chain, proof that institutional-grade liquidity lived there. What the LlamaRisk data actually shows is that many of those deployments across Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos never graduated beyond the legitimacy of their launch announcements, collecting Aave's brand association without ever generating the user volume to justify ongoing maintenance costs.

The cuts don't really hurt Aave's core business, the six flagged deployments represent a tiny fraction of total value locked across the protocol's major presence on Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, and Base. But they do raise a fair question: which other DeFi protocols are running the same math internally, staring at chains that cost more to support than they generate, and just haven't decided to admit it yet?