Aave Could Launch Stablecoin On Ethereum Within Days

The community behind Aave, the leading DeFi money market, is rallying behind a governance proposal to launch its long-awaited GHO stablecoin on the Ethereum mainnet.

The proposal has met quorum and received unanimous support from token holders. Assuming it passes, Aave v3 users will soon be able to mint GHO against their Ether deposits at an annual interest rate of 1.5%, with users that stake the AAVE token receiving a 30% discount.

Aave’s treasury will accrue all interest payments from GHO, and the Aave DAO can change GHO’s interest rate moving forward.

“After extensive community discussion, multiple phases of the Aave DAO governance process, and months of testing on Ethereum’s Goerli Testnet, this AIP proposes the introduction of GHO to Ethereum Mainnet,” the proposal reads.

The AAVE token has outperformed ETH in recent weeks and is up nearly 45% in the past month. Aave is the second-largest DeFi protocol with $5.9B in total value locked (TVL) across eight networks, according to DeFi Llama.

Stablecoin Standoff

The proposal comes as Curve, a stablecoin-focussed DEX and the sixth-ranked DeFi protocol with $3.8B in TVL, is enjoying the success of crvUSD, its own freshly-launched native stablecoin. GHO and crvUSD are both stablecoins minted against deposits in their issuing protocols.

Aave and Curve are seeking to capitalize on openings in the stablecoin sector.

Since the bear market took hold in 2022, DeFi markets have witnessed the failure of Terra’s UST among other algorithmic stablecoins, New York regulators cracking down on Paxos’s issuance of Binance USD, increasing concerns surrounding DAI’s heavy backing from centralized assets, and a decline in USDC’s market cap after the token depegged in March.

Users have borrowed roughly $80M crvUSD since the protocol launched in May, positioning it as the 20th-largest stablecoin, according to data from CoinGecko. crvUSD ranks 12th among stablecoins by volume with $4.7M worth of trades.

Curve initially supported only liquid staking tokens as collateral, but has since rolled out support for wBTC and native Ether.