Aave history: ETHLend, flash loans and a 100-to-1 swap
ETHLend and a Finnish ghost
Stani Kulechov launched ETHLend in 2017 and raised about 16.2 million dollars in an ICO in November that year. The platform matched each borrower with a single lender, and the market stayed small. In September 2018 the project became Aave, the Finnish word for ghost, and switched to shared lending pools.
2020: pools and flash loans
Aave V1 went live in January 2020. Instead of finding a counterparty, you deposit into a pool and borrow from it against collateral. V1 also introduced flash loans: you borrow without collateral and repay within the same transaction. In October 2020 holders swapped the old LEND token for AAVE at 100 to 1, and supply was capped at 16 million.
The 2021 peak
In the DeFi boom AAVE reached its all-time high of 661.69 dollars on 18 May 2021, according to CoinGecko. The token gives you a vote on protocol changes, and staked AAVE is a reserve against bad debt.
Leader in lending
Deposits on Aave hit a record of about 44.9 billion dollars in early October 2025, according to DefiLlama, almost half of all DeFi lending. The protocol runs on Ethereum and a dozen other networks and has its own stablecoin, GHO, launched in July 2023.