Aave's new Monad market tops $100 million in deposits two days after launch

Deposits on Aave's newly launched Monad market surpassed $100 million on Saturday morning, according to TokenLogic, roughly two days after the lending protocol went live on the network.

Aave (AAVE), the largest decentralized lending protocol, deployed V3 on Monad on Thursday, bringing lending, borrowing, and its GHO stablecoin to the chain for the first time. The market launched with support for 12 assets, including USDT0, USDC, GHO, WETH, and Coinbase's cbBTC.

Deposits topped $75 million within the first 24 hours, Aave said Friday.

Monad (MON) is the high-throughput, EVM-compatible Layer 1 network built by former Jump Trading developers that launched its mainnet and MON token on Nov. 24 of last year. The network claims 10,000 transactions per second and 800-millisecond finality.

The early inflows are substantial relative to the size of Monad's DeFi ecosystem. The entire network held about $359.5 million in total value locked as of June 8, according to a LlamaRisk assessment posted to Aave's governance forum, meaning the new Aave market attracted the equivalent of more than a quarter of that figure in two days.

The deposits are also heavily subsidized. Under the deployment proposal authored by TokenLogic in May, the Monad Foundation committed $15 million in incentives over the first 12 months and agreed to acquire and hold 10 million GHO for more than six months, while the Aave DAO pledged another 500,000 GHO to support the stablecoin's adoption on the network.

Risk service provider LlamaRisk backed the deployment with conservative initial parameters, citing Monad's roughly seven months of operating history. The risk firm noted that network activity had compressed after a strong start, with liquidity concentrated in established protocols like Uniswap, Curve, and Morpho.

Notably, Monad received Aave V3.7 rather than the protocol's latest version. Aave V4 launched on the Ethereum mainnet in late March with a new hub-and-spoke architecture, and Aave Labs founder and CEO Stani Kulechov told The Block at the time that the team was pursuing a controlled rollout, as it had with prior versions. The governance proposal leaves it to the Monad Foundation to decide whether and when to migrate to V4.

Aave V4 separately crossed $250 million in deposits on Saturday, per Kulechov. "This is a remarkable milestone for Aave," Kulechov wrote. "Can't wait to see Aave to grow towards [$1 billion] with more crypto-backed loans and expanding to securities backed-lending."

In a statement on the Monad deployment, Kulechov said "the next generation of blockchain applications depends on fast execution and deep, reliable liquidity." Keone Hon, co-founder and general manager of the Monad Foundation, said Aave is a lending standard trusted by institutions and that the deployment puts Ethereum's core liquidity primitives on a faster chain.

The launch extends a multichain expansion that saw Aave go live on OKX's X Layer in March. Per the governance proposal, the next phase on Monad is expected to add Pendle PT assets and Fastlane's shMON liquid staking token.

The deployment caps an active week for the Monad ecosystem: MetaMask launched its Money Account product on Tuesday with Monad as its "home chain."