Aave's current turmoil is short-term, but how it handles new bad debt and the V4 rollout will define market confidence for the rest of the cycle. Core contributors BGD Labs, ACI and Chaos Labs have all left amid disputes. An oracle glitch caused about $26-27M of liquidations, and an attacker used rsETH from the $293M Kelp DAO exploit as collateral to borrow about $196M of WETH, leaving that much bad debt and frozen rsETH markets. TVL fell about $9B and AAVE dropped 22%. x.com 

AAVE is under pressure as holders send tokens to exchanges, which usually signals selling. A $292M exploit left about $200M of bad debt, and roughly $6.6B has since left the platform. Aave is still a big DeFi project, but it is not in a good spot right now. x.com 

Aave looks set to reverse higher now that Morpho's $175M fundraising, which drew buying toward its rival, is done, while Aave was oversold to about 7x earnings, very low for DeFi's most dominant protocol. Morpho's raise was co-led by Paradigm, a16z crypto and Ribbit Capital. x.com 

Aave's token is tanking because holders have lost faith in leadership. Wasted operating spending, a proposal to issue a new Horizon token that would divert revenue from AAVE, and a forced v4 migration alienated core advocates and users, and business partners such as Ripple are leaving. Users did not want to switch to v4, and v3's longer-term utility is in question. Aave's team replies that the Horizon proposal was removed after feedback and that dominance has risen since 2024. x.com  x.com  x.com 

Aave's protocol fees do not reach token holders because Labs controls DAO governance and votes itself grants. Labs voted itself $25 million for operations and $17.5 million in performance incentives, including $5 million for launching an app. Buybacks were paused after the rsETH bridge exploit and have not resumed. Despite the protocol's quality, the Aave token is uninvestable and will keep grinding lower; unlike buyback-funded peers, holders get no direct value. x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  … Show more

AAVE looks like a DeFi blue chip at a basement price. It is the top DeFi lending protocol with more than $13 billion in total value locked and real revenue every day, yet at $76 it trades about 80% below its all-time high. x.com 

Lending tokens fall short of the sector's strong economics because team conduct and uneven holder returns undermine them. Lending capital is sticky and protocols have pricing power, but Aave rugged its DAO and Compound rugged. Morpho signaled no interest in buybacks; Kamino is silent. Maple's buybacks are small, about a tenth of revenue, and inconsistent. Spark buys back about half its revenue, but revenue is very inconsistent. The sector is great; these projects are not. x.com 

Aave is uninvestable because token holders aren't getting the protocol's value. Only about $40-50M has ever gone to token buybacks, against likely hundreds of millions or billions of AAVE inflation used to bootstrap the protocol, and the revenue wasn't used to acquire businesses or grow an Aave empire either. Despite protocol revenue of $907.7M in 2025 by one onchain tally, the token price shows the model isn't working. x.com  x.com  x.com 

Aave should snowball once liquidity fully returns, because it is valued at only about 10% of the over $18B it intermediates while activity is still surging. In the last 30 days it added over $400M of deposits, up 82%, and $254M of active loans, up 98%. x.com 

Bitcoin and ether liquidity is fleeing to AI and the SpaceX IPO, leaving crypto, the darling of 2020-2021, with no bid. The timeline now chases AI the way it chased crypto in 2021, which looks like Magnetar 2.0. Crypto has led markets for a long time and may be leading again, so it may be time to take profits. x.com  x.com