Aave to phase out 96 reserves and wind down six deployments

Aave is pursuing a broad cleanup of underused lending markets through a governance proposal to deprecate 50 low-adoption reserves, remove 21 matured Pendle principal token listings and wind down six deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos. The plan, authored by LlamaRisk, affects about $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in debt, with balances measured on July 28. The proposal remains at the ARFC stage, which comes before a community Snapshot vote and any executable onchain Aave Improvement Proposal. The update adds detail on how the six-market exit would work. All 25 reserves across those deployments would be frozen and their supply and borrow caps cut to 1. Reserves with outstanding debt would also get a 99% reserve factor and a 5% base variable borrow rate, while unborrowed reserves would not receive those two changes. The structure is designed to keep existing positions open initially while discouraging new activity, reducing supplier yield, raising utilization and increasing incentives for borrowers to repay. The proposal also says any further unwind would be handled case by case. Users who remain after the first step could later face higher interest-rate curves, gradual reductions in liquidation thresholds for selected collateral, and eventual replacement of deployment oracles with fixed-price adapters under a companion oracle proposal. Every listed reserve on Scroll, zkSync, Metis and Soneium was already frozen in the July 28 tables, while Sonic and Aptos remained active and are proposed for freezing.