[PRESS RELEASE – London, United Kingdom, August 21st, 2024]

Expansion Enables Greater Access to Liquidity and New Institutional Use Cases

Aave, the leading DeFi protocol governed by the Aave DAO, today announced the launch of Aave V3 on Era Mainnet powered by ZKsync. With efficient and secure transactions provided by ZKsync technology, the launch of Aave V3 on Era is poised to bring liquidity and yield generation capabilities to the Elastic Chain ecosystem. Users of Aave will gain access to advanced zero-knowledge (ZK) technology that provides low-cost transactions while deriving security from Ethereum using cryptographic validity proofs. As part of the integration, Chainlink will provide secure and reliable price feeds.

This integration marks a pivotal moment for both the Aave and ZKsync communities, providing opportunities for increased access, collaboration, and innovation, said Aave Labs Founder and CEO Stani Kulechov. By combining ZK-proofs and the unified Elastic Chain ecosystem, Aave can unlock unprecedented scalability, privacy, and security, expanding the DeFi user base and new institutional use cases.

Alex Gluchowski, Co-Inventor of ZKsync, commented, Aave has established itself as one of the leading DeFi protocols and has played a core role in the growth and adoption of crypto since its launch. As ZKsyncs Elastic Chain keeps building momentum, it is important that it become a place where both retail and institutional users can leverage a secure access point for the digital asset ecosystem across all ZK Chains ZKsync is the most advanced and future-proof scaling solution powered by ZK-proof technology, and with the deployment of Aave on Era, a greater audience will be able to leverage ZKsync to its fullest potential.

Ive been working with the Aave team since 2019, and ZKSync since early 2022, said Johann Eid, Chief Business Officer at Chainlink Labs. In a short amount of time, both projects have had a profound impact on DeFi and the blockchain industry as a whole, helping to drive interest, secure transactions, and bring a large amount of value and innovation into this space. Aave V3s deployment on Era Mainnet brings together a foundational DeFi protocol and a pioneer that is pushing the zero knowledge space forward, which is a major step forward for our industry, and Chainlink Price Feeds are playing a key role in ensuring that the market data powering the protocol is ultra-reliable and accessible. This launch is an important milestone in terms of DeFi scalability, and its potential to increase institutional usage is an exciting development for onchain finance at large.

A Layer 2 scaling solution that leverages ZK technology, ZKsync offers low-cost, faster transactions in a secure and decentralized environment. The addition of Aave is set to attract a wider user base, improve the user experience, and establish Aave as a leading DeFi protocol within the rapidly growing Elastic Chain ecosystem.

DeFi Gateway for Institutional Finance

The Aave deployment will also set the stage for privacy-focused DeFi applications. These applications will leverage Aaves competitive liquidity, flexibility and conservative risk management to meet the increasing demand for enhanced privacy in DeFi. Additionally, this deployment is expected to unlock new institutional use cases, ranging from private networks to networks tailored for specific asset classes, risk profiles, and user segments. This integration also unlocks new opportunities for the Aave-native overcollateralized stablecoin GHO and future products, such as fast, cost-efficient payments.

After positive technical evaluation done by BGD Labs and positive risk analysis by Chaos Labs and asset/parameters recommendations by the risk service providers, BGD had deployed the integration and the Aave DAO has approved USDC, USDT, WETH and wstETH as the initial assets available on Era. The initial risk parameters for each asset can be found here.

The Aave DAO is committed to redistributing any airdrops received from the ZKsync ecosystem via liquidity mining towards Aave users. The distribution will include GHO secondary liquidity incentives, safety module deployments, and merit programs. Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), one of Aave DAOs service providers, will coordinate any liquidity mining campaign on the ZKsync Aave V3 deployment, on behalf of the Aave DAO.

The deployment governance proposals can be found here and here.