Aave vote on Anchorage’s USAT listing moves to Snapshot with borrow-only setup proposed

Initial listing limited to borrowing

LlamaRisk said it supports onboarding USAT to Aave V3 Core on Ethereum and to the Aave V4 Core Hub as a borrowable reserve with collateral disabled. Under that setup, users could borrow the token, but they would not be able to post it as collateral against other assets.

For Aave V3, the recommended parameters include a 20 million USAT supply cap and an 18 million USAT borrow cap. The asset would carry a 0% loan-to-value ratio and liquidation threshold, a 10% reserve factor, and a borrow rate model with a 90% optimal usage ratio, a 0% base rate, 4.4% slope before optimal usage, and 20% after that point. Flashloans are not recommended.

For Aave V4, the proposal places USAT on the Main Spoke of the Core Hub as a borrow-only reserve with no credit line from another hub. The suggested add cap is 5 million USAT and the draw cap is 4 million USAT, with the same basic rate structure and a 10% liquidity fee. In both versions, LlamaRisk recommends a hardcoded $1 price adapter.

Issuer structure and reserves

USAT is described in the review as a fiat-backed US dollar stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., which operates as a national trust bank chartered by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Tether is identified as the token’s technology partner.

According to the assessment, reserves consist of US dollar cash and reverse repurchase agreements backed by US Treasury securities. Those assets are held in a segregated fiduciary trust at Anchorage. The review says Deloitte & Touche LLP has provided monthly attestations since Jan. 31, 2026, and that each report so far has shown reserves exceeding the number of tokens outstanding.

Liquidity and contract control remain key concerns

The review notes that on-chain liquidity is still limited. It points to a Curve USAT/USDT pool with roughly $10 million in depth and says Anchorage’s A1 desk is the main source of trading flow. That desk reportedly swaps USAT and USDT one-for-one in both directions for onboarded clients with no size limit, with settlement ranging from same day to T+1.

LlamaRisk also highlighted concentration risks around custody and governance. It says custody depends on one broker-dealer counterparty and one cash institution, neither of which is named in the public attestation. On the token contract side, the HadronToken codebase has two third-party audits, from OtterSec in October 2024 and ChainSecurity in November 2024, and a bug bounty is active. Even so, upgrade authority and all privileged functions are said to sit under a single 3-of-5 multisig with no timelock and no pause mechanism.

Why the hardcoded price and what comes next

LlamaRisk argues that the proposed restrictions reduce the most immediate protocol risks. With collateral use disabled and the price fixed at $1, temporary market dislocations would not trigger liquidations, while the supply and borrow caps are intended to keep Aave’s exposure within a limited range relative to what liquidators could source at par.

Before any broader listing, the review says Anchorage should address several gaps. It calls for a timelock and clearer role separation over the controlling multisig, as well as publication of the audit reports tied back to the deployed code commit. A future path to enabling USAT as collateral would depend on a robust Chainlink USAT/USD price feed, but the review says that is not required for this initial borrow-only listing.

The next confirmed step is the Snapshot vote, which is scheduled to start in less than 12 hours. That vote will determine whether the community supports moving forward with the proposed USAT configuration on Aave’s Ethereum deployments.