Aave V4 deposits hit a record $1.75 billion

Aave V4 now holds more than $1.75 billion in deposits, an all-time high for the newest version of the decentralized lending protocol, as of November 13, 2026.

Aave is one of the oldest and largest lending platforms in DeFi (decentralized finance). Users deposit crypto to earn yield, and borrowers take loans against their own crypto collateral. No bank sits in the middle. Smart contracts do the work.

A steady climb from launch to record

The growth curve has been fairly consistent.

Deposits on V4 sat at approximately $806 million in late August 2026. By September, they had passed $1 billion. In October, they cleared the $1.5 billion mark.

Now they are above $1.75 billion. That means deposits have more than doubled in less than three months.

Borrowing has kept pace. Active loans on V4 topped $450 million in October. Measured against that month’s $1.5 billion in deposits, roughly 30% of the money supplied was out on loan.

The rollout started on the Ethereum mainnet on March 30, 2026. From there, V4 expanded to Optimism, then to Avalanche in July, and to Base in October.

Where the money is coming from

The deposit growth is not spread evenly. A few specialized markets are doing much of the lifting.

EtherFi Cash on Optimism has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits during peak activity. EtherFi Cash is a crypto spending product, so its users plugging into Aave liquidity gives V4 a steady base of capital.

Circle’s Arc blockchain has brought inflows of USDC and cirBTC. Circle issues the USDC stablecoin, so having Aave running on its chain puts the protocol right next to one of the biggest pools of dollar-pegged crypto.

Base, the newest addition, has seen deposits ranging from $9M to $25M+. That is modest relative to the total, but the chain only went live for V4 in October.

Aave has also brought in external curators such as Sentora. Think of curators as specialist managers who set up and tune markets for particular user groups. That approach lets V4 serve niche segments without Aave’s core team having to hand-build every market.

Why V4 looks different from V3

V4 uses what Aave calls a hub-and-spoke liquidity model. Liquidity pools in central hubs. Individual markets connect as spokes, each with its own rules.

The technical payoff: spokes share the hub’s liquidity, but their risk settings stay separate. A risky asset in one spoke should not be able to drag down a conservative market in another.

That flexibility is central to what Aave wants V4 to do. The design targets a wide range of assets, including tokenized real-world equities.

Meanwhile, V3 is not going anywhere. It still commands around $31 billion in deposits. V4 remains compatible with it, and the two run side by side.

Put the numbers next to each other and V4 holds less than 6% of V3’s deposit base.

The bigger Aave picture

Aave’s scale across all versions is substantial. By October 2026, the protocol had processed $1.1 trillion in cumulative borrow volume.

Aave is running two protocols at once. V3 keeps generating revenue and serving existing users. V4 grows chain by chain and market by market.

What this means

For DeFi users, the main takeaway is that V4 is attracting capital without leaning on Aave forcing a migration. Deposits are coming in because specific products, like EtherFi Cash and Circle’s Arc, find the design useful.

For Aave itself, the concentration of deposits is worth tracking. A few integrations account for a large share of V4’s growth.

Then there is the tokenized equities ambition. Supporting real-world assets on a lending protocol raises questions about pricing, liquidation, and regulation that crypto-native collateral does not. V4’s architecture was built with that use case in mind.

The next milestones to watch are straightforward. Does V4 keep compounding deposits at its recent pace? Does the loan-to-deposit ratio hold up as new chains come online? And at what point does capital start moving from V3’s $31 billion pool rather than just arriving fresh?