Aave is a great lending app and a terrible token to hold. That is my verdict after two reviews, and it is my opinion, not financial advice. Before you read further, know my biases: I hold a large position in Internet Computer Protocol, and MaxFi sponsors my crypto review videos, so I earn when people join through my referral link. Weigh this page with that in mind and check the numbers yourself.
My newer post, AAVE Great Lending App. Terrible Token to Hold, is the detailed case. Aave has roughly $16 billion locked in its lending markets, and I give it full credit for that: real borrowers, real lenders, real demand. My problem is the token. Aave is a governance token with no dividends, and you do not need to own any of it to deposit, borrow, or lend. For October 2026, DefiLlama showed about $39.7 million in user fees, around $5 million kept as protocol revenue, and zero categorized as token-holder revenue. Staking targets about 2.75% a year, and even that is a target rather than a guarantee. The price chart tells the rest: a $513 peak in 2021, a couple of pumps toward $400, a dump from around $300 to under $100, and a recovery to about $131 as I wrote it, already dumping again.
The risk side is what turns "not exciting" into "terrible" for me. The newer Umbrella safety module no longer slashes stakers, but in my view it shifts the insurance burden rather than removing it, and the front ends, bridges, and centralized pieces are still where DeFi tends to break. On April 18, 2026, an exploit involving Kelp's rsETH bridge spilled into Aave's markets, and from April 19 the DAO paused Aave token buybacks to protect its balance sheet. Buybacks were the one story holders could point to, and the first real stress test paused them. At a $2 billion market cap this is no undiscovered coin, so I see no angle where a holder gets rich. That post also lays out my three-part philosophy: ICP for the technology, MaxFi for earning on the tokens you already hold, and tiny-cap meme coins with a real creator behind them as the lottery ticket. Aave fits none of the three, and I predicted an early grave for the token, not the protocol.
My older post, Why I Think Aave Is Heading Toward Zero, from June 2026, made the case from a different angle. Back then I focused on the holder count, about 182,000 wallets carrying a $3.4 billion fully diluted valuation, roughly $18,000 per holder. I argued that TVL is easy to fake, repeating what Kyle Langham from DFINITY told me about setting TVL to whatever a team wants. I walked through the governance process, where you post on a forum, pay Ethereum gas to vote, and then still rely on Aave Labs to make the actual contract changes, with the Aavenomics upgrade approved in August 2024 and still crawling a year later. I pointed at the bridges to other chains as the place a hack could drain the protocol, noted that I could find only four named team members, and said lending has no loyalty, so a faster and cheaper competitor empties it. My conclusion was that the token trends toward zero unless it migrates to ICP.
Between June and November, the bridge warning turned out to be the right one to make; the rsETH exploit came through exactly the kind of connection I worried about, and the buyback pause showed how fast token holders drop to the back of the line when something breaks. I would update two things. First, I was too dismissive of the protocol itself: $16 billion in deposits is real demand, and the newer post separates the app from the token more carefully. Second, I now have the fee data to show the problem instead of asserting it; the June post argued the token was worthless on structure, and the November post shows the zero in the token-holder revenue column.
Where I land is simple. If you want to lend or borrow on Aave, that is your call and the app works. If you want to hold the Aave token, I do not see what you are being paid for. Even an Aave holder has what looks to me like a better option: on Base, MaxFi has an Aave 0.3% fee pool that earned about 42% APR over the 14 days before I recorded, versus 2.75% for staking. Those numbers change daily and pools carry their own risks, so understand how MaxFi works before you put anything in. For the lottery-ticket part of my strategy I back my own coin, which you can read about on my JERRY coin page. Below are both posts in full, newest first.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- AAVE Great Lending App. Terrible Token to Hold (November 7, 2026)
- Why I Think Aave Is Heading Toward Zero: An Honest Review (June 17, 2026)
AAVE Great Lending App. Terrible Token to Hold
From my video published November 7, 2026.
Why I'd Bury Aave Before I'd Hold It
Aave, in my opinion, absolutely sucks as a token to hold, and there is no way I would want it in my portfolio. I want to tell you why, because I imagine you got into crypto to make money and get rich, right? Well, just put Aave in the graveyard. Honestly, you'd be better off burying your money in the graveyard, because at least you could go dig that up later. With Aave I see no future, so many risks, and so little possible reward that it looks like a nightmare to me. So I'm going to roast it in very clear detail, one point at a time. I have been in crypto twelve years and I've reviewed thousands of altcoins, and once you know the information I'm about to share, I can't see why anybody would want to hold Aave. If you read my earlier Aave review, Why I Think Aave Is Heading Toward Zero, you already know where I landed; this is the updated, fully detailed version of that case.
$16 Billion in TVL, but Who Gets Paid?
Aave has about $16 billion locked in DeFi. It is one of the biggest and most successful lending protocols in crypto. So yes, I realize there are real borrowers, real lenders, real winners and real financial activity flowing through it. But I don't see how any of that makes holding the Aave token a good investment. This is the distinction almost nobody draws. People say, well, duh, there are real buyers and lenders, so the token must be good. No. A busy protocol does not automatically make its token a good investment. Here's the big question: if millions of people use Aave, how much of that economic activity actually benefits someone holding the Aave token? Damn near zero.
What the Aave Token Actually Does
Aave is primarily a governance token. If you've watched my crypto reviews for any length of time, you know I hate governance tokens. They act like they're a stock when they have almost no real power. They're impotent. Holders can vote on protocol changes, risk parameters and treasury decisions. Great. It's basically a polling mechanism. We have elections in the United States for presidents and senators, and millions of Americans can't even be bothered to go vote for free. And you're telling me you want to pay money to hold the Aave governance token so you can cast a vote that doesn't matter? That makes no sense to me.
What also makes no sense is that you don't need to own any Aave to deposit money, borrow, or use any of the lending services. The token is not required for the product. And Aave holders don't automatically receive dividends or a fixed percentage of lending revenue. Owning the governance token is not the same as owning the business. So many of these tokens are real tokens, but they sell themselves like they're a stock, and there is a night-and-day difference between holding the Aave governance token and what it would mean if Aave were actually a stock. I laid out the general version of this argument in Most Cryptocurrencies Don't Need a Token, and Aave is one of the clearest examples I've found. A governance token sucks in every way you wouldn't want it to.
That reminds me of a story I put up on my Jerry Banfield Dating channel. I asked a woman to come over to my place on the first date, and she said, "I'm a quality woman. Can't you see?" And I thought, no, I cannot see that you or any other woman I've gone out with all year is a quality woman. I'm having a hard time telling the difference between the quality ones and the rest. The same goes for tokens that tell you they're quality without showing you anything.
So back to the roast. Imagine owning a bank token that lets you vote on the bank's policies without guaranteeing you any share of its profit. How useless is that? That's the Aave token. It's so worthless in my opinion, which is not financial advice. This is why, knowing what I know about Aave, I wouldn't buy it.
When Aave Makes Money, Where Does It Go?
Let's follow the money. For October 2026, DefiLlama shows Aave generated roughly $39.7 million in user fees. Of that, about $5 million was retained as protocol revenue, and the amount categorized as direct token-holder revenue was zero. Most of the lending interest goes to the liquidity providers, and the DAO controls whatever revenue is left. So Aave generates real activity, but where exactly are you, as a token holder, getting a proper piece of the action? You're not. It's like me and my dates, which I talk about on my dating channel: zero action. If you're a quality woman, I'd love to see some.
Is 2.75% Staking Worth It?
What about staking the Aave governance token? Honestly, I can barely say the words "Aave governance token" without my mouth resisting me, it's that bad. Staking Aave targets approximately 2.75% in annual rewards, and even that is a target, not a guarantee. 2.75%. That's not even keeping up with inflation.
Meanwhile, here's a pitch for MaxFi, the sponsor of my crypto review videos, because on MaxFi you don't have to settle for a tiny, itsy-bitsy piece of the action. Look at the APRs they are printing. You could just sit there with ETH and earn 150-plus percent APR. ETH has been running hot and it has slowed down some, but you could still sit on Robinhood Chain and make around 40% providing liquidity to unwrapped ETH in the 0.01 pool. You could get 30% or even 40% on your Bitcoin, and those are what I'd call the safer pools. You could get 19% on your ETH or Bitcoin on Coinbase's chain. And if you get into meme coins and you want to go full degen, you can start printing crazy APRs on those pools, something I dug into in Robinhood Chain Meme Coins Are Paying Insane DeFi Yields. I even have my own two meme coins, JERRY on Robinhood Chain and JBBJ, for anyone who likes that kind of thing. Why would you hold Aave for 2.75% when people providing liquidity are printing like this? Look at the APRs on tokenized stocks: a Take-Two pool printed a thousand percent APR, DJT, the Donald Trump stock token, has been printing about 80% APR over the last 14 days, and the Netflix, Dell and Snap stock tokens are all printing too. I realize many of you may not be aware that things like this exist, but once you are, 2.75% from a governance token looks absurd. You can join through my MaxFi referral link and see the pools for yourself.
The Price Chart Tells the Rest
Staking at 2.75% would be one thing if Aave's price did nothing but go up. It doesn't. The chart peaked back in 2021 at $513 and has bled most of the time since. There were a couple of pumps up toward $400, but then came the dump from around $300 to under $100. It has recovered to about $131 as I write this, and it's dumping again. If it only went up, fine. Instead it sucks a lot of the time, and it sucks for 2.75% that isn't even guaranteed. You see the difference? I can't get excited about a governance target when there's no guaranteed APR and the token routinely dumps more than it pays. For what it's worth, I believe Aave is paired with something on MaxFi, so you can even take your Aave token over there and earn on it rather than staking it for scraps.
Umbrella Safety Module: Who Covers the Losses?
On top of how useless the token looks to me, with its tiny governance APR and price action where the token often dumps far more than it appreciates, there are huge risks around the whole infrastructure. DeFi lending creates bad debt, liquidations, collateral failures and exploits, and you should keep all of that in mind. When exchanges like Binance are getting hacked, you might want to keep your eyes open. I think Aave is dangerous, and if it goes to zero one day I'm going to say I told you so. Ethereum DeFi could get hacked into oblivion by AI. It's all a house of cards, and all of this stuff is tied together. I'm telling you before it probably happens.
Part of the problem is that so much of this is not on chain. The DeFi websites and front ends are off chain. That's how you can get your MetaMask drained while nothing happens on the blockchain itself. I would know. Under Aave's newer Umbrella safety module, they're trying to cover some of these scenarios and they no longer have slashing. But there are still so many ways for lending on Aave to go wrong, especially with AI-driven hacking, bridges, and the centralized parts of the infrastructure. All of that risk for a 2.75% governance yield that isn't guaranteed. And by moving the insurance burden away from Aave itself, I don't believe it significantly strengthens anything; it shifts the burden.
The April 2026 Kelp rsETH Exploit and the Paused Buybacks
Now look at what happened on April 18, 2026. An exploit involving Kelp's rsETH bridge affected Aave's markets. That's how fragile Ethereum DeFi is: a problem in rsETH spilled into Aave's lending markets, and Aave had to respond with risk management. Beginning April 19, Aave token buybacks were paused as the DAO prioritized protecting its balance sheet over purchasing more Aave. Independent analysis found no verified additional buybacks after that.
Think about what that means. If you're hoping for the price to appreciate, they would need to buy back a lot of this token, because anyone who does the research might want to dump it. You hear "buybacks" and you start thinking it's going to be great, but as soon as something breaks, the DAO needs that treasury for the balance sheet instead. And there is so much certainty of something breaking again that the DAO is going to have to keep stacking money, which means token holders can hardly get anything. Token holders are entirely dependent on governance decisions. Buybacks are obviously not dividends either, and right now they're paused. Even when they run, the purchased Aave goes into the DAO's ecosystem where it can be sold again later.
No Angle to Get Rich Here
There is no angle on Aave where you come out getting rich. It isn't happening. It's already a $2 billion market cap; we're not talking about some baby coin nobody has discovered. Buying tokens into a DAO treasury is not the same as paying out profits or having real legal control. I don't see how a token like this is attractive to anybody who has thought any of this through.
Instead of speculating on a governance token, to me there is real technology like ICP, which I cover on my Jerry Banfield ICP channel. My philosophy is straightforward and I keep it the same all the time; there are three things to do in crypto. One: ICP. The technology of the Internet Computer Protocol is absolutely incredible, and it's my largest crypto position. To me it's the future of the internet and makes everything else in crypto look useless by comparison. But that's a long-term thing; the price does what it does, so ICP is my main long-term hold. Two: MaxFi. If you're already doing things in crypto and already holding tokens, then for God's sake at least print money with the tokens you hold. I don't see why anyone wouldn't want to.
Where Aave Fits in My Three-Part Crypto Philosophy
Here's a concrete example of what I mean by printing money with what you already hold. On Base, MaxFi has an Aave 0.3% fee pool that earned about 42% APR over the last 14 days. So even if you own Aave, there's a far better use for it than staking at 2.75%. I'm grateful people are joining through my MaxFi referral link; I'm making money every day from it, and that also means the people who joined are earning. Since I put the link up, eight people in 42 days have earned roughly a thousand dollars providing liquidity through it. When I started I was a complete beginner at this, as I shared in I'm a DeFi Beginner and I'm Already Getting 2,281% APY, so I don't see why, once you know about MaxFi, you would hold a token like Aave for its governance yield instead of printing with the tokens you've already got.
So the three things, again. You've got ICP for the technology, the future of the internet and the infrastructure for AI; you might want to speculate on Internet Computer Protocol for real technology. You've got MaxFi for the APRs I just walked through. And then you have tiny-market-cap meme coins with a real creator behind them. I'm into my own Jerry Banfield meme coins, JERRY and JBBJ, and I compared JERRY with another Robinhood Chain coin in CASHCAT Robinhood Meme Coin vs JERRY. Sometimes you get lucky with a tiny coin, essentially win the lottery and catch a hundred-x. I'm hoping that's what happens with my meme coins, but so far it remains to be seen. I don't see where Aave fits into any reasonable crypto strategy, or even a get-rich one. It doesn't fit at all.
An Early Grave for the Token, Not the Protocol
That's why I make these reviews. I try to show you the best opportunities I've found to make money, but I need to start by telling you where it doesn't look like a good opportunity. To be fair to Aave: the protocol is working. It has real product-market fit, billions in deployed capital and real lending demand. But holding the token looks terrible to me, and I'm predicting an early grave for it. At some point pretty soon, I believe Aave is going to get left behind in the graveyard alongside the many other crypto protocols I've written about, like Core (CORE). I'm not going down with Aave, that's for sure. You can see how this one compares with the rest of my calls in my Crypto Reviews playlist.
I hope to see you on MaxFi as that ninth wallet. And if you want more, head over to the Jerry Banfield store and grab some merch. I have the Comeback Tour shirt: you can have your name on my shirt, and I'll be wearing a shirt that says Jerry Banfield with your name on it. If you want a quick cameo-style video, I've got a video for you. I've got a Jerry Banfield 3D game that plays like Duke Nukem, and a Jerry Banfield fan game. If you want me to review your whole crypto portfolio, without giving financial advice, you can get a video review. I've got mugs I just listed, and a lot more products are on the way. I'm even selling the St. Pete Filmmaker shirt I'm wearing; I'll sell you the shirt off my back. I'll send you a signed book. I've got lots of stuff for you on my website.
Let's be honest: I do these videos to make money, because I'm a full-time creator. You've got a job, and this is mine. Thanks for supporting me at my job. Hoping to see you at the store or on MaxFi soon. Hit that referral link, make your deposit, and start earning, but also watch my other MaxFi videos and MaxFi's own videos so you understand how it works before you put money in. Peace.
Why I Think Aave Is Heading Toward Zero: An Honest Review
From my video published June 17, 2026.
I want to share an honest review of Aave along with a realistic price prediction, because I see some critical problems here and I want you to make great crypto investments. To me, this looks like an awful crypto investment. There's no way I would buy this, and I'm going to walk through exactly why. I've researched thousands of altcoins, and I've been in crypto for 11 years, so this comes from my own experience looking at these projects.
The holder count and the speculation problem
The first problem I see is that this is an Ethereum token with only 182,000 holders. To put that in perspective, the fully diluted market cap on this is $3.4 billion. If you put $3.4 billion into the calculator and divide it by 182,000 holders, that comes out to about $18,000 per holder. That's a lot of money riding on every single wallet that is holding the token.
The next big problem is that Aave is a lending protocol that calls itself decentralized, but in my view it's not actually decentralized. You cannot interact with Aave without going through some centralized third party like the Aave website, and that website is hosted right back on centralized tech. As we've seen with Bybit getting hacked for billions of dollars, if you've got your website on centralized tech and you don't have the entire application fully on the blockchain, your application is not truly or even meaningfully decentralized.
What real decentralization would look like
The only way I believe you can build a truly decentralized website right now is to use the Internet Computer. If Aave was built completely on the Internet Computer, and if it was hosted with a Service Nervous System DAO, then you could have the token and everything on the blockchain. The token would then have real ownership and real voting power. But since this is built on Ethereum, the reality as I see it is that this is just a token that is completely speculative. It's basically like a meme coin, where the token has no legal ownership over any of the Aave protocol and no ownership enforced by code. You're totally reliant upon the development team to do what you ask them to do, because this is built on Ethereum. You don't have the capacity you have on the Internet Computer Protocol, where when you make a proposal it can automatically execute and update the entire blockchain.
So for as high as this is valued on the price chart right now, at billions of dollars, I see a token with no fundamental value backing the people who are holding it. My real question is, what can you actually do with the token? If you hold it, you can get a discount on lending and borrowing. But lending and borrowing is not something people are loyal to. When somebody else comes along with a better lending and borrowing protocol, like what's being built on the Internet Computer where you can borrow against neurons and do it all on a blockchain, everybody exits Aave very easily and moves over to the new platform.
Why I don't trust the TVL numbers
Metrics like TVL are also extremely easy to fake. When I talked to Kyle Langham from DFINITY, he told me they could make the TVL whatever they wanted it to be. So when people are all hyped up about the TVL, that number is very easily faked. What's not so easily faked is looking at how the governance actually works. If you go into the FAQ, you can vote if you have Aave, staked Aave, or Aave on the Ethereum V3 market. But how do you actually vote? You have to go through the governance contracts.
When you look at how the governance process works, first you post on the forum, and this whole part of the process appears to be very centralized to me. Then you make a vote on the chain, which is on Ethereum, so you have to pay gas just to vote. This tech is so bad compared to ICP, where you vote instantly and it's executed fully on-chain. And even with the on-chain voting on Aave, you're still totally reliant on Aave Labs to go through and make the actual changes to the smart contracts.
Bridges, competition, and a bleak future
If you look at their recent posts, they're celebrating millions of users and all these different chains. What I see is a lot of stuff that can go wrong, because Aave is bridged over to these other chains. Those bridges are all centralized, and if one of them on any of those chains gets hacked, the whole protocol could drain. And if anyone builds a competitor, like what's being built on the Internet Computer Protocol, that is faster and cheaper and actually has governance on-chain, Aave's dead.
So to me the future looks bleak for this, because I don't see how much this is likely to go up. If you look at the transactions, they're only now, after years, getting back close to where they were four years ago when this released. This had almost nothing happening during the bear market. For years the transactions were just dead. Now, with people speculating and trading and doing a few more loans, there's a little bit more activity, but you only have a few thousand transfers a day. On the Internet Computer, you have that many transactions every second. On Solana, you have about that many transactions every couple of seconds. The actual amount the token is getting used on the blockchain, which to me is the foundation of what gives something value, has been poor for a long time. We're seeing a little uptick now, but still nothing like the bull market. The number of unique senders is much further down than it was in a bull market.
The team and the pace of change
Another big problem is the Aave leadership. Based on what's posted on third-party websites, there are only four people I can even see on the Aave team. You have a founder, a CFO, a CCO, and a chief communications officer. Are some of these the same person? I don't know. Where are the engineers working on the protocol? Ultimately, this token looks to me like it's totally based on marketing and hype, with almost no meaningful technology behind it. How the Aave protocol works is easily copied to all kinds of other chains and all kinds of lending protocols, which means there's practically infinite competition for this.
And yet you've got people hyping up proposals. I don't see anything exciting here. Look at the Aavenomics implementation. The community approved it in August 2024, and the pace is shockingly slow. It's taking forever to upgrade when you're used to the Internet Computer, where things move fast. On ICP, you can make a proposal and it can execute and upgrade the actual network within a day or so. On Aave you're taking a whole year to make relatively small changes to the protocol, and then it rallies and people get hyped on that. This looks horrible to me. I don't see any reason to buy this or any reason to hold it.
The only scenario where I'd consider holding it
The only reason I would even consider this token for my portfolio is if I personally was using the Aave protocol every single day. If I was doing lots of lending and borrowing on it, which I don't think is a great thing to do in the first place, then it might be worth considering holding the token. But even then, the token is relatively useless in terms of actual utility, because all it does is give you a slightly lower rate and then practically meaningless governance.
So in my opinion this is going to trend toward zero. I believe it will easily get wiped out and won't last the test of time. It has barely limped through its first bear market. Going forward, when the tech is so much further advanced on ICP, I think this becomes irrelevant. The best chance it even has to survive would be to migrate the token to ICP, put the protocol all on there, and get everything secured. If it did that, I'd be bullish on it. But other than that, under no circumstances besides using it every single day would I hold this. I see no reason to speculate on it.
And consider how far the gains could realistically go anyway. This already has the same market cap as the best technology in crypto. If you're holding this hoping it's going to go up, how high is it actually going to go? It's a lending protocol token that's already at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation. I've got a lot more thoughts like this if you want to think through your whole portfolio, and you can find them in my Crypto Reviews playlist. If you'd like to chat, you can join OpenChat and actually use the ICP blockchain completely for free.