Aave is doing spring cleaning: 75 reserves and six chains get cut at once

Aave is preparing a major cleanup: the protocol's risk manager, LlamaRisk, proposed deprecating 75 asset reserves and winding down deployments entirely on six networks — Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos. Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov announced the initiative on July 30.

That's 50 individual reserves with low uptake — including duplicate tokens like USDC.e and USDbC where native versions already exist, plus MaticX after its issuing project shut down — along with 21 expired Pendle PT token series and another 25 reserves being closed alongside the networks themselves. In total, the cuts touch $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt, The Block reports.

• Over six months, deposits fell 74% on Sonic, 86% on Scroll, 88% on zkSync, 79% on Metis, and 95% on Soneium
• Available liquidity on Aptos dropped 94%
• All six networks being wound down together hold $12.8 million in deposits and $4.1 million in debt
• The logic is simple: the revenue each deployment generates no longer covers the cost of supporting it — price oracles, risk monitoring, liquidation mechanisms

The wind-down will happen gradually with no forced liquidations: reserves get frozen, new deposits and borrows get disabled, limits get lowered, and the Reserve Factor on active loans rises to 99% — giving users time to close positions calmly. Notably, this cleanup lands right alongside the opposite trend in the protocol's core business — Aave recently posted its best network growth in five years and crossed $300 million in V4 deposits. The strategy increasingly looks like concentration on chains that actually deliver volume, not multichain presence for its own sake.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.