Aave Labs says deposits on Aave V4 climbed from $212.6 million to $1.34 billion during the third quarter of 2026 after DAO-approved deployments on Avalanche, Arc and Base. In its first 180-day service-provider report to the Aave DAO, the team said V4 crossed $1 billion in deposits on Sept. 16 and had grown from zero at the end of March to more than $1.3 billion in roughly six months.
The report covers the first two quarters since Aave governance approved the Aave Will Win Framework in April 2026. Across that span, Aave Labs said protocol revenue totaled $44.58 million, while deposits across all Aave versions increased by $9.69 billion in Q3 alone.
180 days of DAO work
Aave Labs said its roughly 97-person team spent an estimated 100,000 hours on DAO work over the 180-day period. It reported 6,096 tracked issues completed and 36 projects delivered across engineering, security, product, design, growth, marketing, governance and legal functions.
The company said it authored 26 onchain governance proposals and 20 Snapshot votes during the period, while also shipping 28 products, features or protocol deployments. It additionally prepared and implemented DAO-approved onboarding for 33 unique assets, four deployments on new chains and four new Aave V4 Liquidity Hubs with related Spokes.
During Q2, Aave Labs also took over around 40 technical and support functions that had previously been handled by BGD Labs and the Aave Chan Initiative, including contract maintenance, security coordination, proposal payload engineering and developer tooling.
V4 expansion drives deposit growth
According to the report, Q3 was led by product launches and network expansion. After governance approval, Aave Labs implemented Aave V4 deployments on Avalanche, Arc and Base. Over the broader 180-day window, Aave V4 expanded from Ethereum to three additional chains, with seven new markets approved.
Aave Labs said V4 deposits rose every month over the period. The protocol surpassed $1 billion in deposits on Sept. 16, reached $1.34 billion by the end of Q3 and later hit a high of $1.41 billion on Oct. 12. Active loans on V4 also passed $400 million on Sept. 29, according to the report.
The deployments listed in the update include Ethereum, which went live on July 1 with the Global Dollar Hub; Avalanche, live July 15 with the Avalanche Core Hub; Arc, live Sept. 16 with the Arc Core Hub; and Base, live Sept. 25 with the Equities Hub, including MAG7 tokenized stock exposure.
Products, security and regulated app services
Beyond the core lending markets, Aave Labs said the product stack widened during Q3. The Aave App opened early access on iOS, expanded to five chains and added instant onramps for eligible U.S. users through licensed third-party providers. Balances across Aave App users surpassed $45 million, the report said.
Aave also said it opened Stable Vaults, the infrastructure behind the Aave App, for enterprise use. Other releases named in the report include the official Aave MCP server for reading Aave data and preparing transactions, a redesign of the Aave V3 interface and broader Aave Pro support for new V4 deployments.
On security, Aave Labs said Certora completed formal verification of core Aave V4 and Stable Vaults contracts against defined specifications, and that three new V4 security audits were published during the period. The firm also said its UK subsidiaries, Push Labs Limited and Push Virtual Assets Limited, were registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as cryptoasset exchange providers; those entities support fiat on- and off-ramp services for eligible Aave App users.
Incident response and what comes next
The report also covers the rsETH bridge exploit disclosed on April 18 at 17:35 UTC, when 116,500 rsETH was released on Ethereum without a matching burn on the source chain. Aave Labs said the attacker’s activity briefly affected multiple markets but did not compromise the Aave Protocol itself. It said rsETH backing was restored by May 26 and affected Aave markets returned to normal operation, with a separate post-mortem published elsewhere.
For the next quarter, Aave Labs outlined plans rather than confirmed launches. Those plans include additional V4 network and asset expansion, deployments on Tempo and Monad, native bitcoin borrowing after audits, stock-backed loans on Base using Chainlink pricing, an Android rollout for Aave App and further upgrades to Aave Pro and the project’s data pipeline. The report notes that these forward-looking items remain subject to governance decisions and other uncertainties.
Source: governance.aave.com