Aave Accidentally Misplaces $40B — Finds It Locked in DeFi, Decides to Keep It 🚀🦄

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There are days when you lose your keys, and there are days when you casually “lock” away $40 billion somewhere in the universe, and then tweet about it like you misplaced your trousers but found a golden sock 🌌. According to intergalactic oracle DefiLlama, Aave, the DeFi loan emporium, has reached a fresh milestone in “Total Value Locked,” which is finance-speak for “Look, mum, I’m holding all this digital money hostage on the blockchain and nobody can do anything about it.”

On May 12, the Aave hive-mind chirped on X (the app formerly known as Everything Else): “We’ve locked away $40.3 billion in Aave v3!” (v3 because version numbers are the only thing that outpace inflation). Somewhere, a Doomsday cult shed a single, confused tear.

Aave lets anyone borrow crypto by simply handing over some other cryptos as “collateral.” It’s reminiscent of pawning your neighbor’s lawn mower to fund your own lawn-mowing venture, except with more math and fewer angry neighbors. Lenders, by contrast, get to sit back and watch their coins multiply (at least in theory, and in several alternate dimensions).

DeFi analyst and honorary towel-holder, Jonaso, observed via X: “Aave is dominating the lending space!” To the untrained eye, TVL (Total Value Locked) is just a number, but to Aave, it’s a way of shouting “Mine!” in on-chain Morse code.

Breaking all-time highs

In the grand month of December, back when people still remembered their Polygon wallet passwords, Aave’s TVL shot up because Ether (ETH) performed its classic “moonshot,” going up 60% in value. ETH and its many liquidy cousins are responsible for almost half of that $40 billion. You begin to see why llamas are involved—someone has to count all those coins.

This time, users themselves poured their digital lunch money in, cranking TVL to new chart-denting, headline-baiting highs.

Counting in ETH terms (for those who distrust numbers with dollar signs), Aave’s vault went from “Oh, a modest 6 million ETH” at New Year’s, to “Crikey, nearly 10 million ETH!” by May 12. Expressing TVL in ETH is a bit like measuring your height in apples—sure, the apples change size, but the stack still looks impressive.

Before former US President Donald Trump completed his victory lap, Ether was changing hands at a paltry $2,500 per ETH (mere pocket change). By December it almost kissed $4,000, perhaps inspired by the holiday shopping crunch. Somewhere in this quarter, Aave’s happiness balloon was very nearly visible from orbit.

The past month, Ether decided to see what all the fuss was about, ascending from $1,500 to $2,500, according to the ever-watchful folks at Google Finance (who sleep in shifts to update those numbers).

Not to be outdone, Aave’s own native AAVE token decided to have a week-long party, leaping 25% purely because, apparently, it could. If you blinked, you missed it, but you probably heard the collective shouts all the way from Crypto Twitter.

One small step for mankind, one giant locked vault for DeFi-kind. If you can find the key, please inform Aave. 🔑🤖

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2025-05-13 02:53