Aave, a leading decentralized lending protocol, is moving to dissolve its deployments on six blockchains: Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos. A new governance proposal argues that these chains collectively hold less than 1 percent of Aave's roughly $14 billion in total assets and each generates under $5,000 in quarterly revenue. That makes them far more expensive to maintain than they are worth, especially once auditing, monitoring, and cross-chain infrastructure costs are included. The proposal would affect about $98 million in deposits, according to data cited by the community discussion.
The six chains targeted by the proposal have seen participation fall sharply. Deposits on some have dropped more than 90 percent from their peaks. Aave deployed to these networks during a period of aggressive expansion, when liquidity providers and developers rushed to enable “multichain” access across the ecosystem. But after several market cycles, many of these networks have failed to build enough organic demand for lending and borrowing to justify ongoing operational support.
Under the proposal, Aave would freeze each affected market to new activity. Existing positions would be allowed to continue for now, but borrowing costs would be pushed prohibitively high. In practice, this creates a strong financial incentive for users to repay their loans and withdraw their deposits voluntarily. Aave describes this as a soft landing: the protocol avoids a sudden cutoff that could strand users or create bad debt, while still moving toward a full exit from chains that are not producing meaningful activity.
Why low revenue chains become liabilities
Decentralized lending protocols carry unique overhead. Each deployment requires smart contract auditing, active risk monitoring, price oracle integrations, and support for liquidity management. If a chain has low transaction volume and a small pool of users, the cost of maintaining those systems can quickly exceed the small fees earned by the protocol. Aave's proposal says the six chains each earn “loose change” in revenue, and in some cases the expense of servicing the deployment may be many times the revenue it generates. This is a familiar problem in DeFi, where protocols expanded too quickly during bull markets and are now rationalizing their footprint.
Additionally, low-activity deployments introduce a security surface area without a corresponding benefit. A market with very few borrowers and depositors can still be attacked, manipulated, or exploited. Cross-chain messaging risks, bridge vulnerabilities, and oracle manipulation become more dangerous when the economic security of a market is thin. By retiring these markets, Aave reduces the number of attack vectors across its system and concentrates liquidity and risk management on chains where activity is meaningful.
The networks affected
The proposal lists six chains: Sonic, a high-performance EVM network; Scroll, a zero-knowledge rollup; zkSync, another ZK-rollup ecosystem; Metis, an Ethereum Layer 2 focused on scalability; Soneium, a Layer 2 backed by Sony's blockchain efforts; and Aptos, a non-EVM Layer 1 built with the Move language. Some of these networks are still actively developing and have their own communities. Yet from Aave's perspective, the numbers do not support continued deployment. Even in a best-case scenario where each chain is earning close to $5,000 a quarter, the total is less than $30,000 in combined quarterly revenue - a fraction of what a major deployment on Ethereum or another top-tier chain would generate.
The proposal also calls for retiring around 50 asset markets elsewhere. These are not necessarily entire chains; they are individual token markets on networks Aave continues to serve. Asset markets that lack borrow demand, have low collateral usage, or present a poor risk-reward profile are candidates for retirement. The goal is to simplify the protocol's asset list and avoid spending governance time and monitoring resources on tokens that no longer contribute to the ecosystem.
How Aave reached this point
Aave is one of the oldest and largest lending protocols in crypto, having launched its first version on Ethereum in early 2020. Over the years, Aave expanded through v2, v3, and eventually to a wide range of Layer 1 and Layer 2 chains. Multichain expansion was a central part of Aave's strategy during the previous bull run. The protocol deployed to more than a dozen networks and listed dozens of collateral assets, giving users flexible access to borrowing and lending across the fragmented market.
That expansion worked well when incentives attracted liquidity and when the broader crypto market was growing quickly. However, as token prices fell and incentives tapered off, many small deployments began to look unsustainable. Governance proposals had to keep approving “markup” updates, risk parameter adjustments, and periodic financial contribution updates for chains that barely had any borrowers. This contributed to governance fatigue among token holders, who often had to vote on minor changes for networks with negligible usage. The new proposal is a response to that fatigue, offering a single sweeping action to remove underperforming chains from the protocol's maintenance queue.
The move is also part of a broader industry trend. Several large DeFi protocols have reversed their expansion strategies, closing markets that no longer attract users. Rather than treating every chain as a potential home for liquidity, protocols are now deciding where they can sustainably maintain deep liquidity and robust oracle support. Aave's proposal signals that the era of “deploy everywhere” is over, replaced by a more selective approach that emphasizes efficiency, security, and capital productivity.
What it means for users
Users with assets on the affected chains should pay close attention to the governance process. While the proposal does not set an immediate deadline for withdrawals, the intended mechanism is to make borrowing unattractive until all positions are unwound. If a user is borrowing an asset on one of these chains, the interest rate could climb sharply as the market is wound down. If a user is supplying assets, they may see their yield decline as borrowing disappears.
Source:Coindesk News