Aave to retire 50 low-activity assets, close six chains

The decentralized lending protocol Aave is undertaking a major restructuring, announcing plans to remove 50 low-activity asset reserves and completely wind down its markets on six smaller blockchain networks. The move, announced by founder Stani Kulechov on July 30, 2026, is designed to reduce economic and technical risks by exiting underutilized deployments.

The sweeping changes affect approximately $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt across Aave's multichain operations. The protocol will deprecate 50 individual asset reserves and retire 21 matured Pendle principal tokens. Furthermore, it will initiate an orderly shutdown of its full deployments on the Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos networks, which together cover another 25 reserves.

According to the plan developed with risk management firm LlamaRisk, the removal of the 50 individual reserves accounts for $85.3 million in supply and $11.5 million in debt. The six complete network wind-downs account for the remaining $12.8 million in supply and $4.1 million in debt. Kulechov stated the decision follows a comprehensive review and the implementation of new internal risk and...