Aave to exit six low‑revenue chains

Aave will wind down V3 deployments on six chains after a risk report recommended freezing reserves, imposing tight caps and redirecting nearly all borrower interest to the protocol treasury. The affected chains are Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos.

The Request for Final Comments was filed by risk provider LlamaRisk on July 29. The filing covers 25 lending reserves that together show about $12.8 million supplied and roughly $4.1 million in outstanding debt, based on LlamaRisk data dated July 28. The forum discussion remained open at the end of July prior to any community Snapshot or on‑chain Aave Improvement Proposal.

LlamaRisk framed the proposal around support costs exceeding fee revenue. The filing reports that Sonic, Scroll and zkSync each generate under $5,000 in quarterly protocol revenue at current balances, while Metis, Soneium and Aptos each generate under $1,000. The proposal cites costs such as oracle maintenance, monitoring and operational support but does not provide a full quantification of the deficit.

Under the initial stage, every reserve in the six markets would be frozen and both supply and borrow caps would be set to 1. Reserves that carry outstanding borrows would be assigned a 99% reserve factor and a 5% base variable rate for borrowing; reserves without outstanding borrows would not receive those two parameter changes. The 99% reserve factor would direct almost all interest paid by borrowers to the Aave treasury, while the higher base borrowing rate is intended to lower supplier yields and encourage withdrawals.

The freeze would stop new supply, new borrowing and the use of assets as fresh collateral. Existing positions would remain open during the initial stage. LlamaRisk noted several reserves were already frozen as of the July 28 snapshot on Scroll, zkSync, Metis and Soneium, while Sonic and Aptos reserves were still active in that table.

The ARFC describes additional measures that could be used later on a case by case basis if balances do not decline. Those measures include raising interest rate curves, tightening liquidation thresholds for selected collateral, and replacing deployment oracles with fixed‑price adapters after further unwinds. Such changes would affect rates, collateral parameters and oracle pricing for any users who remain after the initial freeze.

The filing also addresses a separate group of markets: 50 individual reserves and 21 matured Pendle principal tokens across 11 deployments. Those assets together show about $85.3 million supplied and $11.5 million borrowed and were included in the request for community feedback distinct from the six‑market proposal.

Aave governance requires the ARFC stage before a community Snapshot and any executable Aave Improvement Proposal, providing token holders and community members an opportunity to comment on the proposed parameters and sequence of actions.