Decentralized lending protocol Aave is considering shutting down six of its Version 3 blockchain markets and removing roughly 50 low-usage reserves, following a recommendation from a DeFi risk management firm aimed at streamlining the platform's sprawling footprint.
The Proposal
The recommendation came from LlamaRisk, a risk management service that advises decentralized finance protocols. The firm advised Aave to wind down every reserve operating on six blockchains: Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos.
According to the analysis, these markets and reserves have attracted little activity, making them candidates for offboarding as Aave looks to reduce operational overhead and concentrate resources on more heavily used deployments.
Cutting dead weight lets a protocol focus its resources where users actually are.
Maintaining underused markets carries costs and potential risks for a lending platform, even when the individual deployments hold minimal value. By offboarding low-use reserves, Aave can trim complexity across its multi-chain presence.
Action Already Underway
Notably, much of the recommended cleanup has already been set in motion. The report indicated that action against most of the flagged blockchain instances had already been taken before the formal recommendation was published.
That timing suggests Aave's governance and contributors were already moving toward consolidating the protocol's V3 markets, with LlamaRisk's guidance largely confirming steps in progress rather than opening an entirely new debate.
Key elements of the proposal include:
- Winding down all reserves on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos
- Offboarding around 50 reserves flagged as low-use
- Reducing operational complexity across Aave's multi-chain deployments
As one of the largest lending protocols in DeFi, Aave has expanded across numerous blockchains over the years. Periodic reviews of where liquidity actually resides help the protocol prune markets that fail to gain traction while preserving its core, higher-volume deployments.