Decentralized finance (DeFi) risk management service LlamaRisk has formally recommended that the Aave lending protocol wind down every single reserve across six distinct blockchains. The sweeping proposal marks a significant tightening of operational scope for the leading decentralized liquidity market, targeting a cleanup effort that encompasses $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt across multiple deployments.
According to a comprehensive Aave governance proposal introduced on July 31, 2026, the cleanup initiative spans V3 markets on six separate blockchains alongside the retirement of dozens of low-utilization token listings. Working in collaboration with other Aave service providers, LlamaRisk recommended the complete offboarding of 50 low-use reserves and 21 matured Pendle principal token listings spread across 11 different deployments. Furthermore, the risk firm proposed the total retirement of all 25 reserves situated on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos, with underlying balances measured as of July 28.
Within the structured governance pipeline of the protocol, the action currently stands as an Aave Request for Comments (ARFC). This designation represents a detailed technical proposal and serves as a formal precursor to an Aave Improvement Proposal (AIP). Market participants and community members should note that an ARFC is not, by itself, proof of a completed final onchain vote or execution, though it indicates the direction of upcoming governance decisions.
The proposed exit from Aptos arrives just 11 months after Aave initially launched its V3 market on the ecosystem in a bid for broader expansion. However, data provided by LlamaRisk indicates that available liquidity on the Aptos deployment has plummeted by 94% over a six-month period, while quarterly revenue generated by the instance has fallen below $1,000, prompting the drastic reassessment.
The current state of the targeted blockchains varies considerably depending on prior administrative steps. Every reserve on Scroll, zkSync, Metis, and Soneium was already frozen prior to the latest recommendation, whereas Sonic and Aptos remained active and have now been officially recommended for freezing by the risk management team.
This ongoing governance shift follows a broader temp check on Aave’s multichain strategy that officially concluded on Dec. 5, 2025. That previous measure passed overwhelmingly, securing 923,400 votes in favor and under 1% against. The December vote laid the groundwork for increasing the reserve factor on underperforming instances, shutting down deployments on zkSync, Metis, and Soneium, and establishing a strict $2 million annual revenue floor for the future deployment of any new protocol instances.
Scroll was subsequently integrated into the category of affected protocols through an accelerated process in April. At that time, LlamaRisk filed a direct-to-AIP proposal to freeze every Scroll reserve and raise selected reserve factors, describing the measure as the necessary completion of Scroll’s deprecation following a rapid deterioration in network liquidity and overall Aave market activity there.
To formalize these actions, Aave published an updated risk framework on June 9, covering asset, bridge, monitoring, and chain risk, alongside explicit criteria for winding down reserves or deployments. The governance announcements issued throughout July indicate the de facto adoption of those stricter rules by the protocol and its decentralized community.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov addressed the strategic realignment in a Thursday social media post, explaining that the actions will successfully reduce Aave’s economic and technical risk surface in alignment with the newly established Aave Risk Framework and Technical Asset Listing Framework.
Despite scaling back operations on multiple struggling or low-adoption networks, leadership emphasized that this initiative does not represent a complete reversal of Aave’s multichain expansion strategy. Instead, it reflects a calculated and strategic refocusing on select, high-performing protocols and sustainable deployments.
Aave will continue applying continuous risk assessment for all assets across all deployments to safeguard protocol solvency and liquidity, Kulechov noted. The conservative pivot also arrives on the heels of other recent network expansions, including Aave launching its V3 lending market and GHO stablecoin integration on Monad, as well as bringing V4 infrastructure to Avalanche earlier in the month to lay the groundwork for tokenized asset lending.
