Aave, the largest decentralized lending protocol, is considering a proposal to abandon six of the blockchains it had expanded onto, in a cleanup affecting about $98 million in deposits. The proposal would see Aave retire “low-adoption” asset markets and 21 expired Pendle principal tokens across 11 Aave deployments, while shutting down its presence on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos entirely.
The arguments is based on economics. Each of the six deployments now generate less than $5,000 a quarter. Metis, Soneium and Aptos bring in under $1,000 each, according to the proposal. That does not cover the cost of running them, which includes maintaining price feeds, liquidation systems and monitoring for each market.
For context, Aave’s Ethereum mainnet deployment generates more than $142 million a year and Base about $4.7 million, while Metis produces roughly $3,000.
Deposits have collapsed across all six over six…