Points of Focus

• Aave plans to deprecate 75 asset reserves and retire deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos.
• The proposal affects $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt, while also removing 21 matured Pendle PTs.
• The overhaul introduces stricter risk standards, including offboarding low-adoption assets and duplicate bridged tokens.

Aave is preparing one of the largest cleanup efforts in its history, proposing to remove dozens of low-activity assets and wind down six underperforming blockchain deployments as part of a sweeping overhaul of its risk management framework.

Founder Stani Kulechov announced that the protocol will deprecate 50 low-adoption asset reserves across existing Aave markets while simultaneously shutting down deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos, affecting another 25 reserves. The proposal also retires 21 matured Pendle Principal Tokens (PTs) whose underlying yield strategies have already expired.

After a comprehensive review, Aave is deprecating 50 low adoption asset reserves across multiple deployments.

In addition, Aave is orderly winding down deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos, covering another 25 asset reserves.

As part of this process,…

— Stani (@StaniKulechov) July 30, 2026

Combined, the changes affect $98.1 million of supplied assets and $15.6 million in outstanding debt, marking one of the broadest governance-driven restructurings ever proposed for the lending protocol.

The initiative follows the introduction of Aave‘s new Risk Framework and Technical Asset Listing Framework, which formalize how assets are listed, monitored, and ultimately removed when they no longer justify the operational cost or risk they introduce.

Aave targets assets that no longer justify their cost

The proposal, prepared by risk service provider LlamaRisk, argues that many of the affected reserves have experienced years of declining usage.

According to the governance proposal, every listed reserve creates ongoing overhead regardless of size. Each requires oracle maintenance, parameter monitoring, liquidation infrastructure and governance oversight. When liquidity dries up, those fixed costs begin outweighing the benefits of keeping the market active.

The review therefore targets several categories simultaneously:

• low-adoption lending markets;
• bridged assets where native versions already exist, including USDC.e and USDbC;
• MaticX, which is being sunset by issuer Stader;
• matured Pendle Principal Tokens that no longer generate yield;
• and six entire blockchain deployments whose activity has fallen below economically sustainable levels.

Rather than removing markets immediately, Aave intends to freeze them, reduce supply and borrow caps to one, increase reserve factors, and gradually encourage suppliers to withdraw while borrowers repay outstanding loans.

Chainlink oracle concerns accelerate offboarding

A parallel governance proposal also recommends retiring a series of Chainlink price feeds supporting long-tail assets across Aave V2 and V3.

LlamaRisk argues that many underlying assets have become so illiquid that their secondary-market prices are no longer reliable enough for lending markets. Chainlink now classifies several of these feeds as high or very high operational risk, prompting Aave to replace live market feeds with fixed-price oracle adapters during the wind-down process.

The oracle deprecation proposal covers roughly $6.76 million in supplied assets and $4.29 million in debt, affecting assets including LUSD, FRAX, RPL, BAL, MAI, sUSD, GHST, USDm and others across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, Polygon, Scroll and Celo.

The fixed-price approach is intended to prevent stale or manipulated market prices from affecting collateral valuations while remaining users exit their positions.

Six blockchain deployments face complete shutdown

Unlike the individual reserve removals, six smaller Aave deployments are being retired entirely.

LlamaRisk concluded that activity on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos has declined to levels where protocol revenue no longer covers oracle infrastructure, monitoring and maintenance costs. Together the deployments account for approximately $12.8 million in supplied assets and $4.1 million in debt.

Some declines have been particularly steep:

• Sonic deposits fell 74% over six months, from $28.9 million to $7.6 million.
• Scroll deposits dropped 86%, from $16.1 million to $2.2 million.
• zkSync shrank 88%, falling from $7.2 million to $844,000.
• Aptos available liquidity declined roughly 94%, leaving only $1.7 million in supplied assets.

For these markets, every reserve will be frozen, supply and borrow caps reduced to one, reserve factors increased to 99%, and base borrowing rates lifted to 5% to encourage users to close positions.

A shift toward quality over quantity

The proposal signals a broader strategic shift for Aave.

Rather than maximizing the number of supported assets and chains, the protocol is moving toward maintaining fewer, more liquid markets that satisfy stricter operational and security requirements.

Kulechov said Aave will continue conducting continuous risk assessments across all deployments, with future listings evaluated under the protocol’s newly formalized risk standards.

If approved by governance, the changes would significantly reduce Aave’s maintenance burden while concentrating liquidity around the protocol’s highest-usage assets and most active markets.