Aave has proposed removing dozens of thinly used lending markets and retiring six entire blockchain deployments, a governance overhaul that would affect roughly $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding borrowing, according to an Aave Request for Comment prepared by risk service provider LlamaRisk.
The proposal would deprecate 50 low-adoption asset reserves and 21 matured Pendle Principal Token markets across 11 Aave V3 deployments. It would also wind down Aave’s deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos, removing a further 25 reserves.
If approved by Aave governance, the changes would freeze the affected markets to new activity and make existing positions progressively more expensive to maintain. The plan places particular focus on markets whose lending activity no longer justifies the cost of price oracles, liquidation systems and continuing risk oversight.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov announced the proposal on Thursday. LlamaRisk said its review was conducted under Aave’s proposed Risk Framework, introduced in June, and assessed the protocol’s deployments as a portfolio rather than evaluating each reserve in isolation.
Nearly $100 million sits in markets slated for removal
The largest share of the proposed reduction involves individual asset reserves rather than entire networks. Those removals cover about $85.3 million in supplied assets and $11.5 million in outstanding debt, according to the governance post.
The six network-level retirements account for another $12.8 million in supplied assets and $4.1 million in debt. The proposal says the largest deployment set for deprecation holds approximately $7.6 million in total supply, while the next two networks hold materially less.
The figures show that Aave’s exposure on the targeted networks remains relatively limited compared with its major V3 markets, but the affected positions are spread across a large number of assets and chains. That fragmentation can make a small reserve costly to operate: each active market may require reliable price data, liquidation support, parameter maintenance and monitoring for collateral and borrowing risks.
Aave’s proposed changes seek to consolidate those operational demands around markets with sufficient activity and revenue to support them.
Borrowing costs would rise as markets are frozen
For individual reserves marked for removal, Aave would freeze new deposits, borrowing and other new market activity. Supply and borrow caps would be lowered to one unit, effectively preventing meaningful new positions while allowing existing users to close or reduce their exposure.
Borrowable assets would also receive higher reserve factors. A reserve factor is the share of borrower interest directed to the protocol’s treasury rather than suppliers. Raising it reduces the yield available to depositors and changes the economics of keeping funds in a market that is being phased out.
The six deployments facing full retirement would receive a more aggressive set of parameters. Under the proposal, reserve factors would be raised to 99% and base interest rates would increase. The combination is designed to encourage borrowers to repay and suppliers to withdraw, reducing the number of open positions before a deployment is fully wound down.
The proposal does not set out a universal deadline requiring every user to exit within a specified number of weeks. Yet users with affected positions would face changing interest-rate conditions and reduced flexibility once markets are frozen. Borrowers who leave loans open would need to monitor their health factors, since a declining collateral value or accumulating interest can increase liquidation risk in any lending market.
Matured Pendle tokens and duplicated bridge assets are targeted
Among the reserves slated for deprecation are 21 matured Pendle Principal Tokens, known as PTs. Pendle PTs represent the principal component of a yield-bearing position and reach a fixed redemption value at maturity. Once matured, they no longer deliver the yield-related exposure that helped define their original use case.
LlamaRisk’s proposal also targets bridged versions of assets that duplicate native-token listings. Maintaining both a native asset and multiple bridged representations can split liquidity between similar markets while introducing bridge-related dependencies and differing risk profiles.
The review therefore favors reserves with clearer utility, adequate activity and infrastructure support. It also reflects a more conservative approach toward collateral that depends on external bridges or specialized token structures.
The proposal follows bridge-related risk concerns
The review arrives after Aave introduced its proposed Risk Framework in June following an approximately $292 million exploit involving the KelpDAO bridge. In that incident, stolen rsETH was deposited as collateral, creating potential bad-debt exposure for lending protocols that accepted the asset.
A separate LlamaRisk proposal has addressed another category of long-tail reserves with elevated Chainlink price-feed risk. That proposal calls for replacing live feeds with fixed-price adapters for the affected assets, limiting the ability to use changing market prices in those markets.
Together, the measures point toward a tighter distinction between Aave’s core lending markets and smaller, more complex reserves whose risks can be difficult to price or operationally costly to manage. The current deprecation proposal applies that logic to low-usage markets and entire deployments where revenue no longer covers maintenance requirements.
Governance will determine the rollout
The proposal is listed on Aave’s governance forum under the title “ARFC | Low adoption asset deprecation on Aave V3.” As an ARFC, it remains part of Aave’s governance process and would require further approval before parameter changes or deployment retirements take effect.
For users, the immediate issue is whether they hold supplied assets or debt in any of the named reserves and networks. Frozen markets would no longer support normal expansion of positions, while higher reserve factors and borrowing rates would make the economics less attractive as the wind-down progresses.
Aave’s plan would reduce its footprint across six smaller chains and remove 71 low-adoption or matured markets, concentrating the protocol’s lending activity in deployments where liquidity, oracle coverage and risk operations can be maintained more efficiently.
Explore how centralized exchanges manage risk and DeFi evolution as Aave streamlines markets and deprecates low-adoption blockchain deployments.
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