Where to buy Aave

Aave is a cornerstone of decentralized finance. It lets users lend their crypto into shared pools to earn interest, or borrow against their holdings as collateral, all governed by smart contracts rather than a bank. Interest rates adjust automatically with supply and demand, and everything settles on-chain.

Originally launched as ETHLend in 2017 and relaunched as Aave in 2020, the protocol pioneered features now common across DeFi, including flash loans, which let users borrow and repay within a single transaction. It operates across multiple blockchains and consistently holds billions of dollars in deposits.

AAVE, the governance token, lets holders vote on how the protocol runs, from risk parameters to which assets are supported, and can be staked into a safety module that backstops the system in exchange for rewards. Its supply is capped at 16 million tokens, small compared with most assets in this list.

AAVE is an ERC-20 token listed on most major exchanges, so it is easy to buy with fiat. Its value tracks both the health of the Aave protocol and broad crypto sentiment, and it is volatile like any crypto asset.