Aave is the work of Stani Kulechov, a Finnish lawyer who earned his law degree from the University of Helsinki (2018) while becoming increasingly drawn to Ethereum and smart contracts. In 2016, during Ethereum's early days, he watched the DAO hack unfold (3.6 million ETH stolen) — rather than being discouraged, he saw opportunity in it.
-
November 2017: he launches ETHLend — one of the very first peer-to-peer DeFi lending platforms on Ethereum, solving the problem that HODLers needed liquidity without having to sell their crypto.
-
Late 2017: an ICO raises roughly $16.2 million through LEND token sales.
-
ETHLend's early model was slow: lenders and borrowers manually negotiated terms, and many requests went unfilled for days due to low liquidity.
-
January 2020: a full relaunch under the name “Aave” (Finnish for “ghost”) — switching from the peer-to-peer model to a pooled liquidity model; July 2020: a token swap converts 1.3 billion LEND tokens into newly minted AAVE at a 100:1 ratio.
-
Aave's signature innovation is the Flash Loan: an uncollateralized, instant loan that must be borrowed and repaid within the same transaction — an entirely new financial instrument possible only on a blockchain.
Aave is today considered the world*'*s largest and most trusted on-chain lending platform, having processed trillions of dollars in cumulative activity across its history.