Aave hits $100M in Monad deposits within 48 hours of launch

Aave’s lending market on Monad had already surpassed $100 million in total deposits in two days of launching on July 2. That’s a milestone some DeFi projects spend months trying to reach.

The top DeFi lending protocol went live on Monad on Thursday with its V3 deployment. This launch marks the first time Aave’s lending, borrowing, and GHO stablecoin ecosystem has been officially launched on the chain.

Aave bets on Monad’s speed

The new deployment supports 12 assets, including USDT0, USDC, GHO, WETH, and Coinbase’s cbBTC. The most important strategic change is the broadening of Aave’s GHO stablecoin distribution. It was already available on Base and Arbitrum, but the Monad integration is the first to go beyond Ethereum Layer 2 networks.

The rapid growth follows an equally strong start, with the protocol attracting more than $75 million in deposits within its first 24 hours. The deployment is yet another step in Aave’s multichain expansion strategy as the protocol seeks to capture liquidity across emerging blockchain ecosystems.

Monad, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible Layer 1 developed by former Jump Trading engineers, is designed for high-throughput applications.

Industry observers see the strong inflows as evidence that users are increasingly willing to put their money to work on a platform that offers lower latency, cheaper execution, and Ethereum compatibility.

The Monad Foundation promised $15 million in first-year incentives

Since the mainnet and MON token launch in November 2025, the EVM-compatible Layer 1 Monad has focused entirely on scalability. The blockchain achieves 10,000 transactions per second and settles blocks in about 800 milliseconds.

Moreover, Monad’s entire DeFi ecosystem was worth $359.5 million as of June 8, according to a LlamaRisk forum post. Aave pulled in more than 25% of that total value in only 48 hours. Primarily, generous subsidies are fueling these growth metrics. Under a proposal passed in May by TokenLogic, the Monad Foundation committed $15 million in first-year incentives and agreed to hold 10 million GHO for over six months. Meanwhile, the Aave DAO is allocating 500,000 GHO to bootstrap stablecoin adoption on the chain.

The path to Aave’s Monad launch started with a Temp Check proposal on Feb. 24, 2026. Strong community support carried it through the governance process, culminating in final approval in late June and a July 2 rollout.

LlamaRisk backed the launch, though with cautious settings, noting that Monad has been around for only 7 months. It also contended that network activity dropped after a strong opening, with most liquidity crowded into established names like Uniswap, Curve, and Morpho.

Concurrently, Aave V4 achieved a new TVL milestone on Saturday, surpassing $250 million in deposits. Aave V4 rolled out on the main Ethereum network in late March using a brand-new “hub-and-spoke” setup. At the time, Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov said they were taking things slow and steady, just as they had with earlier versions. Now, the official vote leaves it up to the Monad Foundation to decide whether and when to upgrade to V4.

Speaking on the deposit milestone, Kulechov said, “Can’t wait to see Aave grow towards [$1 billion] with more crypto-backed loans and expanding to securities-backed lending.”

CEO Kulechov anticipates a $50 trillion Abundance Asset Market by 2050

Recently, Kulechov asserted that decentralized finance has a massive opportunity to leverage $50 trillion in tokenized asset abundance as on-chain collateral by 2050. He noted that solar energy projects could easily make up $15 trillion to $30 trillion of that massive pool. 

He explained that a solar financier could tokenize a $100 million development and instantly borrow $70 million against it to fund new builds. For regular crypto savers, this opens up a low-risk, diversified way to earn yield on-chain.

He added that the type of financing provides investors a way to invest in tokenized solar infrastructure, cash out after three years, and reinvest in future projects. Additionally, he said the concept could also transform batteries, robotics, vertical farming, semiconductors, and 3D printing.

Almost $25 billion in real-world assets have been tokenized on blockchain networks, primarily across Treasuries, equities, commodities, private lending, and real estate. Abundance assets stand out by emphasizing renewable infrastructure rather than finite resources.

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