Aave isn’t just big for DeFi. It’s the largest lending protocol in the sector by a mile, with more than $50 billion in assets deposited across its markets. That's a balance sheet that would slot it roughly into the ranks of the top 50 U.S. banks by assets if it were a traditional institution.

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Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave and developer Aave Labs, has a straightforward version of what he’s building: "Aave will be the backbone of all credit," he said. Not just leverage for crypto traders, but mortgages, credit cards, consumer and business loans, even sovereign debt — with DeFi running quietly in the background.

The path there runs on two rails. On the consumer side, the upcoming Aave App, now listed on Apple’s App Store, aims to become a savings account for average investors. Users see an interface closer to a neobank; under the hood, deposits are funneled into Aave’s onchain lending markets — a textbook "DeFi mullet" play where a familiar, Web2 front end masks the complex blockchain and DeFi engine in the back end.

Then, there's the institutional side and the booming tokenized real-world asset space. Aave's Horizon, which debuted this August, is offering regulated players a marketplace to borrow stablecoins on their tokenized assets 24/7 while staying inside compliance lines. It has grown into a roughly $600 million pool despite the past months' crypto headwinds.

As the world is migrating onchain and traditional financial rails and blockchain rails are becoming increasingly intertwined, Aave is positioned to sit close to the center of that flow.

Most recently, Aave has found itself at the center of a governance dispute between tokenholders — participants in the protocol’s self-governing DAO — and Stabi Kulechov's Aave Labs over control of key revenue streams and who ultimately holds rights to core project assets like the brand, trademarks and related IP. At issue is not just the protocol’s parameters onchain, but the power that sits around it.

The ramifications of the outcome reaches far beyond the protocol itself. How that conflict is resolved could define what governance tokens truly grant holders in practice, set a precedent across DeFi for protocol ownership and the boundary between decentralized governance and corporate stewardship.