Aave isn’t just for DeFi. It is the largest lending agreement in the industry, with more than $50 billion in assets parked on its market. If it were a traditional institution, this balance sheet would roughly rank it among the top 50 U.S. banks by assets.
Stani Kulechov of Aave Labs, founder and developer of Aave, has a simple version of what he’s building: “Aave will be the backbone of all credit,” he said. It’s not just leverage for cryptocurrency traders, but also mortgages, credit cards, consumer and business loans, and even sovereign debt – while DeFi operates quietly in the background.
The road there has two railroad tracks. On the consumer side, the upcoming Aave app is now available on the Apple App Store and is designed to be a savings account for the average investor. The interface users see is closer to that of a neobank; behind the scenes, deposits are funneled into Aave’s on-chain lending market—a textbook “DeFi mullet” game where the familiar Web2 front end masks the complex blockchain and DeFi engines on the back end.
Then there’s the institutional side and the booming tokenized real-world asset space. Launched in August of this year, Aave’s Horizon provides a marketplace for regulated participants to borrow stablecoins on their tokenized assets 24/7 while staying within compliance. Although the cryptocurrency has faced headwinds over the past few months, it has grown into a pool of approximately $600 million.
As the world is moving on-chain, with traditional financial tracks and blockchain tracks becoming increasingly intertwined, Aave is positioned to be close to the center of that process.
