defi

1) Executive summary
$AAVE is DeFi's dominant lending project, operating decentralized markets where users supply assets to earn yield and borrowers access overcollateralized loans. The project manages risk parameters directly through governance, offering a battle-tested approach to decentralized lending with over five years of operational history. Since launching in 2020, Aave has iterated toward greater capital efficiency, risk segmentation, and multichain expansion across three major versions, with V4 expected later in 2026.
January marked a strong start to 2026 across Aave's core lending metrics. TVL, active loans, fees, and revenue all grew month over month, with TVL and active loans also posting substantial year-over-year gains. Market share expanded as Aave continued to outpace the broader lending sector's growth. However, monthly active users declined both month over month and year over year, continuing a trend of consolidation following elevated activity in late 2025.
The chain distribution remained concentrated on #Ethereum , which accounted for over 80% of TVL, active loans, fees, and revenue. However, user activity continued to skew toward Aave's multichain deployments.
🔑 Key metrics (January 2026)
Total value locked: $57.33b (+5.18% MoM, +59.71% YoY)Active loans: $23.25b (+7.27% MoM, +58.12% YoY)Fees: $75.13m (+14.95% MoM, -4.81% YoY)Revenue: $9.96m (+14.47% MoM, -34.27% YoY)Monthly active users: 114.60k (-5.83% MoM, -15.80% YoY)Market share: 62.82% (+0.61 pp MoM, +1.73 pp YoY)
👥 Aave team commentary:
"January reinforced Aave's position as foundational infrastructure for onchain lending. Total loans originated since launch approached $1 trillion, ETH deposits on the Ethereum Core market reached an all-time high, and Aave's share of #defi TVL has grown from approximately 8% to 28% over the past two years.
Distribution expanded meaningfully through integrations with Kraken DeFi Earn, Jumper Exchange, and Balance. These partnerships extend Aave's reach into CeFi, custody, and aggregation layers without fragmenting liquidity. Stablecoin adoption continued to drive growth, with PYUSD crossing $400m in deposits and over $15b in stablecoin supply now flowing through the protocol.
The Horizon market for RWA-backed lending reached new milestones, with deposits approaching $600m and borrows crossing $200m. On the engineering side, the Aave V4 security contest concluded with 918 participating researchers, marking progress toward the V4 protocol upgrade expected later in 2026.
Aave's recently published '2025 Year in Review' provides further context: at peak, $AAVE held $75b in deposits, enough to rank among the top 50 U.S. banks by assets held. The protocol also processed over $1.1b in liquidations across 100,000+ events without a single issue, while GHO supply grew to nearly $500m."
2) Total value locked
Total value locked (TVL) measures the total USD value of collateral deposited into Aave and outstanding loans. January TVL averaged $57.33b, up 5.18% from December's $54.51b and up 59.71% from January 2025's $35.90b. Ethereum accounted for 81.77% of deposits, with Plasma (8.19%), Arbitrum One (3.52%), and Base (2.59%) comprising the largest non-Ethereum deployments.

3) Active loans
Active loans measures the total USD value of outstanding borrows across all Aave lending markets. January active loans averaged $23.25b, up 7.27% from December's $21.67b and up 58.12% from January 2025's $14.70b. The chain distribution closely mirrored TVL, with Ethereum at 81.90% and Plasma at 8.75%.

4) Fees
Fees measure the total USD value of fees paid by users across all of Aave's lending markets. This metric aggregates fees from six primary sources: lending interest from V2 and V3 markets, flash loan fees, liquidation fees, GHO borrowing interest, and GHO stability module fees. January fees totaled $75.13m, up 14.95% from December's $65.36m but down 4.81% from January 2025's $78.93m. Trailing twelve-month fees reached $943.71m. Ethereum generated 79.63% of fees, a smaller share than its 81.77% of TVL, with Plasma (9.65%) and Base (3.26%) contributing disproportionately to fee generation relative to their deposit bases.

5) Revenue
Revenue measures the total USD value of fees retained by the Aave DAO. January revenue totaled $9.96m, up 14.47% from December's $8.70m but down 34.27% from January 2025's $15.15m. Trailing twelve-month revenue reached $138.30m. Ethereum accounted for 84.31% of revenue, a higher share than its 79.63% of fees, reflecting stronger revenue retention on mainnet relative to other deployments.

6) Monthly active users
Monthly active users (MAU) measures the number of unique wallet addresses that have interacted with #AAVE over a rolling 30-day period. January MAU totaled 114.60k, down 5.83% from December's 121.70k and down 15.80% from January 2025's 136.10k. Unlike TVL and fees, user activity skewed heavily toward L2s: Base led at 38.16%, followed by Ethereum (20.40%) and Arbitrum One (16.77%). L2 chains collectively accounted for over 56% of monthly active users.

7) Market share
Market share measures $AAVE share of active loans relative to other lending projects, including Morpho, Maple Finance, Fluid, Spark, Kamino, Compound, Euler, and Venus. Aave averaged 62.82% market share in January, up 0.61 pp from December and up 1.73 pp year over year. With $23.25b in active loans out of a $37.00b total market, Aave held more than the combined total of all other tracked competitors.

8) Definitions
Products:
Aave V1: the original version of Aave, launched in January 2020.Aave V2: the second major version, launched in December 2020, introducing features like flash loans and credit delegation.Aave V3: the current major version, launched in March 2022, enabling multichain expansion and improved capital efficiency.Aave V4: the upcoming version, expected in 2026, promising a unified Liquidity Hub with modular risk controls.GHO: a decentralized stablecoin native to Aave, launched in 2023, where borrowers mint GHO using their Aave collateral.Horizon: Aave's market for RWA-backed lending, enabling credit against tokenized real-world assets.
Metrics:
Total value locked: measures the total USD value of collateral deposited into Aave and outstanding loans.Active loans: measures the total USD value of outstanding borrows across all Aave lending markets.Fees: measures the total USD value of fees paid by users across all of Aave's lending markets. This metric aggregates fees from six primary sources: lending interest from V2 and V3 markets, flash loan fees, liquidation protocol fees, GHO borrowing interest, and GHO stability module fees.Revenue: measures the total USD value of fees retained by the Aave DAO.Monthly active users: measures the number of unique wallet addresses that have interacted with Aave over a rolling 30-day period.Market share: measures Aave's share of active loans relative to other lending projects.
This article is my personal research and opinion, so if you have to perform any action do your own research also.
#AAVEUSDT #bullishleo

When people talk about crypto, they often mention DeFi , short for Decentralized Finance. But what does that actually mean? Let’s break it down in a simple way.
DeFi is all about removing the middleman. In traditional finance, banks, brokers, and payment platforms control your money, charge fees, and decide who gets access. DeFi flips that. It uses blockchain technology to let anyone, anywhere, lend, borrow, or earn interest on their money without relying on a bank.
For example, in DeFi you can:
Lend your crypto and earn interest. Your money works for you, instead of sitting idle.
Borrow crypto by using your holdings as collateral , all without credit checks.
Swap tokens instantly on decentralized exchanges, no account needed.
It’s powerful, but also comes with risks. There are no banks to protect your funds, so if a project fails, you could lose money. That’s why learning the basics and starting small is key.
DeFi also introduces concepts like staking, yield farming, and liquidity pools , fancy words for ways to earn more with your crypto. But at its core, DeFi is just about having control over your money and letting it grow in ways that weren’t possible in traditional finance.
Why it matters for beginners:
DeFi opens doors to financial opportunities previously reserved for banks and institutions. It’s flexible, accessible, and global. But with freedom comes responsibility , understanding the risks is just as important as learning how it works.
Takeaway:
Think of DeFi as finance without the middleman. It’s like having a bank in your pocket but you’re the one in charge. Start small, learn the ropes, and watch your crypto grow responsibly.
#Beginnersguide #defi #crypto

@Dusk #dusk $DUSK
In the evolving landscape of blockchain and decentralized finance (DeFi), Dusk Network positions itself as a privacy-centric, regulatory-compliant blockchain infrastructure designed to bridge traditional financial markets with decentralized technologies. Its stated mission is to return direct control over financial assets to users, while enabling compliance automation so that regulated assets can be issued, traded, and managed on-chain.
What is Dusk Network?
At its core, Dusk Network is a Layer-1 blockchain built specifically to support regulated financial markets by:
Allowing institutions and individuals to issue, trade, clear, and settle financial instruments on-chain with native privacy protections.
Combining zero-knowledge cryptography for confidentiality with protocol-level compliance mechanisms to satisfy real-world regulatory frameworks like the EU’s MiFID II, MiFIR, MiCA, and GDPR-style standards.
This blend enables a decentralized, privacy-preserving financial system that institutional actors can feasibly adopt — a goal that many public blockchains struggle to meet due to open transparency and lack of compliance support.
Self-Custody: Empowering Users with Control
One of Dusk’s central visions is self-custody, meaning users retain full control of their digital assets without reliance on intermediaries or custodians. This reflects a core principle of financial freedom: true ownership.
How Self-Custody Works on Dusk
Dusk’s XSC security token standard governs asset tokens (e.g., tokenized stocks or bonds), built to maximize security and minimize fraudulent risk.
Users can hold these tokenized assets in their own wallets; transfers only occur directly between parties without centralized custodians.
This design echoes the broader DeFi ethos — users control their keys, and therefore their assets — while still enabling regulated interactions with traditional financial instruments.
Zero-Knowledge Cryptography: Privacy as a Right and a Tool
A foundational pillar of the Dusk Network is zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) — cryptographic methods that allow one party to prove a statement is true without revealing underlying data.
Why This Matters
ZKPs enable users and institutions to transact privately, while still proving compliance to authorized parties when required.
Examples include verifying age without revealing identity, or proving eligibility for certain asset types without revealing personal data.
This technology underpins Dusk’s confidential smart contracts and selective disclosure features — giving parties privacy with provable legality.
Compliance Automation Built Into the Protocol
Unlike many blockchains where regulatory compliance is addressed after the fact, Dusk weaves compliance into the protocol itself.
Automated Compliance Benefits
Institutions currently invest massive resources in KYC/AML and regulatory compliance. With Dusk, many of these processes can be encoded and automated at the ledger level, reducing duplication and cost.
Tools like Citadel — a privacy-preserving digital identity solution — allow individuals to complete KYC once, then reuse that compliant identity across services without repeatedly exposing personal data.
By treating “code as law”, Dusk aims to ensure the network itself enforces regulatory rules, reducing reliance on trusted third parties.
Tokenization and Real-World Assets
A major promise of Dusk Network is to tokenize a broad range of traditional financial assets, including bonds, equities, and other instruments.
Advantages of Tokenization
On-chain tokenization reduces barriers to market participation by lowering entry costs and enabling fractional ownership.
Tokenized assets can move freely on-chain with enhanced liquidity and settlement speed compared to traditional systems.
This could democratize access to asset classes historically limited to institutional investors, advancing financial inclusion globally.
Bridging DeFi and Traditional Finance
By marrying DeFi principles (like self-custody and decentralized control) with regulatory compliance and privacy, Dusk Network positions itself uniquely in the Web3 space.
Where traditional financial systems impose heavy custodial layers and compliance burdens, Dusk strives to embed these functions into its protocol, empowering users with autonomy while satisfying legal frameworks — potentially accelerating adoption by both retail users and institutions.
Conclusion: A New Frontier for Financial Freedom
Dusk Network offers a compelling infrastructure for a financial system that is private, decentralized, and compliant at its core. With self-custody, advanced privacy technology, and protocol-level compliance automation, it aims to unlock broader access to regulated financial markets — enabling users to participate in the global economy from their own wallets.
#BinanceSquareFamily #blockchain #Web3 #defi