# Ketju research: Aave v4

- URL: https://riadefi.com/rejections/aave-v4/
- Verdict: rejected
- Type: Dollar lending
- Reviewed: 2026-09-27
- Last confirmed: 2026-09-27

## Research summary

Aave v4 remains research-only and is rejected for now because its production record is immature, not because its design is flawed. Aave v4 launched on Ethereum in March 2026 with three separate Liquidity Hubs, Core, Prime, and Plus, and ten initial Spokes after roughly 345 cumulative days of security review supported by a $1.5M DAO budget. The code work is serious; the production record is necessarily short. The architectural change is more important than the version number: a Hub owns and prices pooled liquidity, while Spokes define collateral, borrowing, liquidation, and risk-premium rules. Separate Hubs are solvency boundaries, but every Spoke attached to one Hub shares that Hub's assets. Bad debt from one badly parameterized collateral Spoke is realized against the same Hub liquidity, bounded by add and draw caps rather than hard isolation. Inter-Hub credit lines add another controlled path for losses to spread. That is more flexible and potentially more capital-efficient than v3, but it increases the number of contracts, settings, and governance decisions that determine a supplier's true exposure. Core, Prime, and Plus must each build enough live liquidation and withdrawal history to be assessed separately, and the v3-to-v4 migration must show that production scale is not outrunning risk operations. This rejection can be reopened; it is not a postponed judgment. The review triggers below state exactly what production evidence, per Hub, would change it.

## Observable review triggers

- Reopen a named Hub and asset only after at least 12 months of production history and one liquidation above 1% of that Hub's TVL without bad debt or withdrawal impairment
- The proposed-size withdrawal must execute from the exact Hub and asset below 50 basis points while trailing-30-day utilization remains below 90%
- Every connected Spoke, per-asset add cap, draw cap, liquidation configuration, pause authority, and inter-Hub credit line must be reproducible from executed governance and live contracts
- Any Spoke draw cap above 10% of its Hub's matching-asset liquidity, or any inter-Hub credit line lacking a published loss boundary, prevents reopening
- Any core exploit, Hub bad debt, failed proposed-size withdrawal, or unaudited Hub, Spoke, oracle, or configurator upgrade withholds approval
- Re-review migration when v3 liquidity falls below two times v4 liquidity on the same chain and asset; protocol-wide TVL ratios are insufficient
- A weekend or holiday gap of more than 10% between the held Chainlink price and the underlying stock’s next open, a corporate-action pause longer than one trading day, or a liquidation of a tokenized stock on Base that clears more than 5% below the stock’s last print, reopens the Equities Hub and the Coinbase Tokenized Stock file together

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Published by Ketju Research (https://ketjuresearch.com). Educational analysis only; not legal, tax, compliance, or investment advice.
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