As of November 13, 2026, Aave V4 holds more than $1.75 billion in deposits, a record for the latest version of the decentralized lending protocol.
Aave is one of DeFi’s (decentralized finance) oldest and largest lending platforms. Users deposit crypto to earn yield, while borrowers take out loans against their own crypto collateral. No bank is involved. Smart contracts handle the process.
A steady climb from launch to record
The growth has been fairly steady.
V4 deposits stood at about $806 million in late August 2026. They topped $1 billion by September and passed the $1.5 billion mark in October.
Deposits are now above $1.75 billion, more than double the level from less than three months ago.
Borrowing has grown at a similar pace. Active loans on V4 topped $450 million in October. Compared with $1.5 billion in deposits that month, roughly 30% of supplied funds were on loan.
The rollout began on the Ethereum mainnet on March 30, 2026. V4 then expanded to Optimism, followed by Avalanche in July and Base in October.
Where the money is coming from
Deposit growth has not been evenly distributed. A handful of specialized markets account for much of it.
EtherFi Cash on Optimism has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits during periods of peak activity. EtherFi Cash is a crypto spending product, and its users’ access to Aave liquidity gives V4 a steady capital base.
Circle’s Arc blockchain has brought in $USDC and cirBTC. Circle issues the $USDC stablecoin, so Aave’s presence on its chain puts the protocol alongside one of the largest pools of dollar-pegged crypto.
Base, the latest addition, has seen deposits range from $9M to $25M+. That is modest compared with the total, but the chain only went live on V4 in October.
Aave has also brought in outside curators such as Sentora. Curators are specialist managers who set up and adjust markets for specific user groups. This lets V4 serve niche segments without requiring Aave’s core team to build each market by hand.
Why V4 looks different from V3
V4 uses what Aave calls a hub-and-spoke liquidity model. Liquidity is pooled in central hubs, while individual markets connect as spokes, each with its own rules.
The technical benefit is that spokes share hub liquidity while keeping their risk settings separate. A risky asset in one spoke should not be able to affect a conservative market in another.
That flexibility is central to Aave’s plans for V4. The design is intended to support a wide range of assets, including tokenized real-world equities.
Meanwhile, V3 remains active, with around $31 billion in deposits. V4 is compatible with it, and the two operate side by side.
By comparison, V4 holds less than 6% of V3’s deposit base.
The bigger Aave picture
Aave’s scale across its versions is substantial. By October 2026, the protocol had processed $1.1 trillion in cumulative borrowing volume.
Aave is operating two protocols at once. V3 continues to generate revenue and serve existing users, while V4 expands chain by chain and market by market.
What this means
For DeFi users, the key point is that V4 is attracting capital without Aave forcing users to migrate. Deposits are arriving because specific products, such as EtherFi Cash and Circle’s Arc, find the design useful.
For Aave, the concentration of deposits is worth watching. A few integrations account for a large share of V4’s growth.
Then there is the goal of supporting tokenized equities. Using real-world assets as collateral on a lending protocol raises questions about pricing, liquidation and regulation that do not apply to crypto-native collateral. V4’s architecture was designed with that use case in mind.
The next milestones are clear. Will V4 continue compounding deposits at its recent pace? Will the loan-to-deposit ratio hold as new chains come online? And when might capital begin shifting from V3’s $31 billion pool, rather than arriving entirely as new funds?
