Aave (AAVE) price, chart and history
Aave is $179.01, down 3.39% in the last 24 hours. Market value $2.76 billion, rank #46.
About Aave
Aave is a lending and borrowing service that runs on blockchains instead of through a bank. People deposit crypto into shared pools to earn interest, and others borrow from those pools after locking up collateral worth more than their loan. AAVE is the project's token: holders vote on how the protocol is run, and can stake it as a safety backstop that helps cover losses if the system ever runs short.
The project began in 2017 as ETHLend, a person-to-person lending site started by Finnish law graduate Stani Kulechov, which raised about $16.2 million in a token sale. In 2018 it renamed itself Aave, Finnish for ghost, and moved to a pooled model, going live on Ethereum in January 2020. The original LEND token was swapped for AAVE at 100 to 1 in 2020. The company Aave Labs builds the software, while token holders govern it.
Aave helped popularise flash loans, which let developers borrow with no collateral as long as the money comes back within the same transaction. It now runs on many blockchains and issues its own stablecoin, GHO. Its main risks are bugs and weak collateral: in April 2026 an exploit at another project, Kelp DAO, left Aave facing possible bad debt. Disputes between Aave Labs and token holders over control have also drawn criticism.
- Created by
- Stani Kulechov (originally as ETHLend)
- Launched
- January 8, 2020 (Aave protocol on Ethereum)
- How it's secured
- Smart contracts on Ethereum and other chains, backed by staked AAVE
- Supply
- Maximum of 16 million AAVE