Why Aave proposes quitting 6 blockchains that earn under $5,000 a quarter

Aave, the largest decentralized lending protocol, is considering a proposal to abandon six of the blockchains it had expanded onto, in a cleanup affecting about $98 million in deposits. The proposal would see Aave retire “low-adoption” asset markets and 21 expired Pendle principal tokens across 11 Aave deployments, while shutting down its presence on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos entirely.

The arguments is based on economics. Each of the six deployments now generate less than $5,000 a quarter. Metis, Soneium and Aptos bring in under $1,000 each, according to the proposal. That does not cover the cost of running them, which includes maintaining price feeds, liquidation systems and monitoring for each market.

For context, Aave’s Ethereum mainnet deployment generates more than $142 million a year and Base about $4.7 million, while Metis produces roughly $3,000.

Deposits have collapsed across all six over six months. Soneium fell 95%, available liquidity on Aptos dropped 94%, zkSync declined 88% to about $844,000, Scroll fell 86% to roughly $2 million, Metis dropped 79%, and Sonic, the largest of the group, fell 74% to just under $8 million.