Lenders deposit funds into Aave and receive interest payments from borrowers (supply-side fees).

Aave is a non-custodial lending protocol built on Ethereum and other adjacent blockchains. Aave was founded by Stani Kulechov and launched in 2017.

AAVE tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total interest paid by borrowers (revenue). Aave’s investors include ParaFi Capital, Framework Ventures, Three Arrows Capital, etc.

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Aave

Aave | Data breakdown

# Aave Revenue Methodology

## 1. Overview

Revenue measures the portion of fees that Aave retains in its treasury, representing the protocol's earnings before operating expenses and token incentives. Protocol revenue is generated across multiple products, including Aave V2, Aave V3, Aave V4, Aave GHO (Ethereum), Chainlink SVR, and Velora. These earnings are accumulated from interest rate spreads (reserve factors), flash loan premiums, liquidation protocol fees, GHO stability module fees, treasury yield on held assets, Chainlink Smart Value Recapture (SVR) MEV distributions, and Velora positive slippage claims. The retained revenue is directed to the Aave Collector contracts to support the DAO treasury.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: ERC-20 `Transfer` events, native asset transfers, `Mint`, `Burn`, and `BalanceTransfer` events from `AToken` contracts, `Mint` and `Burn` events from `VToken` and `TokenBase` contracts, `ReserveDataUpdated` events from `LendingPool` and `PoolLogic` contracts, `ReserveFactorChanged` events from `LendingPoolConfigurator` and `PoolConfigurator` contracts, `FlashLoan` events from `LendingPool` and `FlashLoanLogic` contracts, `LiquidationCall` events from `LendingPool`, `LiquidationLogic`, and `Spoke` contracts, and `UpdateAsset`, `MintFeeShares`, and `UpdateAssetConfig` events from Hub contracts (including `CoreHub`, `PlusHub`, `PrimeHub`, `GlobalDollarHub`, `CashHub`, and `EquitiesHub`), covering Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, and 12 other chains
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds and asset metadata

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Aave V2 and Aave V3 interest revenue

- **Purpose**: Calculates the protocol's share of interest accrued from borrowers in Aave V2 and Aave V3.
- **Logic**: For Aave V2, interest revenue is captured from ERC-20 `Transfer` events of aTokens minted directly to the treasury address from a null address, excluding denylisted treasury management transactions. For Aave V3 (except Monad and Aptos), treasury interest accruals are extracted from daily state snapshots of the pending protocol share accumulator. For Monad, where historical state is unavailable, interest is reconstructed by tracking scaled variable debt balances using `Mint` and `Burn` events from `VToken` contracts, applying index updates from `ReserveDataUpdated` events, and multiplying by the reserve factor from `ReserveFactorChanged` events. For Aptos, interest is calculated by multiplying daily changes in the variable borrow index (from `ReserveDataUpdated` events) by the cumulative variable debt balance (derived from `Mint` and `Burn` events from `TokenBase` contracts) and applying the reserve factor.
- **Key fields**: `amount`, `index_value`, `reserve_factor`, `variable_borrow_index`

### Component B: Aave V4 interest revenue

- **Purpose**: Calculates the protocol's share of interest accrued in Aave V4.
- **Logic**: Daily interest revenue is calculated from Hub contracts (including `CoreHub`, `PlusHub`, `PrimeHub`, `GlobalDollarHub`, `CashHub`, and `EquitiesHub`). The daily delta of accrued fees is extracted from `UpdateAsset` events, representing the sum of realized and unrealized fees. To account for resets when the treasury claims fees, daily minted fees from `MintFeeShares` events are added to the delta. The reserve factor (liquidity fee in basis points) is extracted from the latest `UpdateAssetConfig` events to determine the total fees and supply-side fees.
- **Key fields**: `accrued_fees`, `minted_fees`, `liquidity_fee_bps`

### Component C: Flash loan premium revenue

- **Purpose**: Captures the protocol's share of premiums paid by flash loan borrowers.
- **Logic**: Flash loan premiums are extracted from `FlashLoan` events from `LendingPool` contracts (for EVM chains) and `FlashLoan` events from `FlashLoanLogic` contracts (for Aptos). The total premium amount is multiplied by a hardcoded protocol fee split of 0.04% (0.0004) to isolate the protocol's retained revenue from the supply-side share.
- **Key fields**: `amount`

### Component D: Liquidation protocol fee revenue

- **Purpose**: Calculates the protocol's share of liquidation bonuses.
- **Logic**: For Aave V3, liquidation transactions are identified from `LiquidationCall` events. The protocol's share is captured by tracking ERC-20 `Transfer` events of collateral aTokens from the liquidated user to the treasury address, and applying the liquidation protocol fee factor. For Aave V4, protocol revenue is calculated from `LiquidationCall` events on Spoke contracts by multiplying the liquidated collateral amount by the ratio of protocol fee shares (the difference between collateral shares liquidated and collateral shares sent to the liquidator) to total collateral shares liquidated. For Aptos, protocol revenue is calculated by multiplying the liquidated collateral amount from `LiquidationCall` events by the daily liquidation protocol fee factor extracted from the reserve configuration bitmap.
- **Key fields**: `liquidated_collateral_amount`, `collateral_shares_liquidated`, `collateral_shares_to_liquidator`, `liquidation_factor`

### Component E: Aave GHO (Ethereum) interest and stability module revenue

- **Purpose**: Calculates revenue generated by the GHO stablecoin and its stability modules.
- **Logic**: GHO interest revenue is calculated by tracking cumulative GHO debt balances from `Mint` and `Burn` events from `VToken` contracts, calculating the daily percentage change in the variable borrow index from `ReserveDataUpdated` events, and multiplying the index change by the cumulative balance. GHO stability module revenue is captured by aggregating incoming and outgoing GHO transfers to and from the stability module contracts, excluding transfers to the treasury. Because GHO is a self-custody product, 100% of these fees are retained as protocol revenue with zero supply-side allocation.
- **Key fields**: `amount`, `interest`, `variable_borrow_index`

### Component F: Treasury yield revenue

- **Purpose**: Calculates interest earned on aTokens held directly in the Aave treasury.
- **Logic**: The treasury's total aToken balance is tracked daily by aggregating real balances (from `Mint`, `Burn`, and `BalanceTransfer` events from `AToken` contracts) and virtual balances (pending protocol share accruals). Daily yield is calculated by multiplying the previous day's total scaled balance by the daily change in the liquidity index (extracted from `ReserveDataUpdated` events) and normalizing by the index scale.
- **Key fields**: `real_scaled_balance`, `accrued_to_treasury`, `liquidity_index`

### Component G: Chainlink SVR and Velora slippage revenue

- **Purpose**: Captures revenue from external integrations and positive slippage.
- **Logic**: Chainlink Smart Value Recapture (SVR) revenue is captured by tracking native ETH transfers from the Chainlink SVR Gnosis Safe to the Aave Collector contract. Velora positive slippage revenue is captured by tracking ERC-20 and native asset transfers from Velora Fee Claimer contracts to the Aave Collector contracts. These external revenues are fully retained by the protocol with zero supply-side fees.
- **Key fields**: `amount`

### Component H: Normalization and USD conversion

- **Purpose**: Normalizes all revenue components and converts them to USD.
- **Logic**: Raw asset amounts from all components are normalized by decimal precision using asset metadata. Normalized amounts are then multiplied by end-of-day asset prices from price feeds to determine the USD value. Daily revenue is aggregated by day, chain, and product using UTC day boundaries.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `chain_id`, `product_id`, `revenue`

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

fees * take_rate (illustrative — revenue is observed directly per project, not derived from take_rate)

Fee revenue retained after supply-side payouts. Before cost of revenue (e.g. L2 DA fees) and before operating expenses.

AaveAAVE

Revenue

Revenue

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown