Aave V4 Closes In on $1B in Deposits

A Hub-and-Spoke redesign is pulling in capital fast — but the headline number depends on how you count.

By The crypto-money Desk

Aave V4 has crossed $900 million in total assets supplied and is closing in on the $1 billion mark — less than six months after its mainnet debut in March. [1]

The figure comes from Aave's own accounting. Independent tracker DeFiLlama puts the number closer to ~$399 million, because its methodology excludes borrowed assets and doesn't yet cover every V4 deployment. [1][2] Assets borrowed from a lending protocol are not counted towards its TVL — only the coins actually locked in the contracts are. Among other reasons, this avoids inflating TVL through cycled lending (deposit, borrow, re-deposit the same coins). Borrows are tracked as a separate metric instead. [2]

V4's architecture explains much of the gap. The protocol swaps V3's siloed pools for a Hub-and-Spoke design: central Hub vaults hold a chain's liquidity, while user-facing Spokes — Core, Prime, Plus, and others — draw a governed credit line from that shared pool rather than bootstrapping their own. [1]

Growth has been steep: roughly 131% over the past 30 days alone, with active loans topping $250 million for the first time. A dedicated EtherFi Cash instance on Optimism and an Ethena market that launched September 7th have driven much of the surge. [1]

The gap between self-reported and independent figures isn't a scandal — it's a methodological fork that will matter more as on-chain lending matures and capital efficiency becomes the central competitive variable.

Even near $1 billion, V4 remains a small fraction of Aave's roughly $30 billion supplied across V3 and more than 20 chains. [1] Early traction for new infrastructure — not a transition complete.

This is early traction for new infra rather than a changing of the guard, at least for now.Bankless