Why DeFi giant Aave is pulling the plug on six hyped blockchains making less than $5,000 a quarter

In a July 29 forum-stage proposal, Aave risk service provider LlamaRisk recommended winding down the decentralized lender’s V3 deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos. The plan would put $4.1 million of debt on a staged exit path that keeps existing positions open during the initial step.The Aave Request for Final Comments, or ARFC, covers 25 lending reserves with $12.8 million supplied, based on LlamaRisk data dated July 28. The forum thread still showed the request under discussion on July 31. Aave’s proposal lifecycle places an ARFC before a community Snapshot and any executable on-chain Aave Improvement Proposal.LlamaRisk’s economic case rests on support costs exceeding revenue. It said Sonic, Scroll, and zkSync each generate less than $5,000 in quarterly protocol revenue at current balances, while Metis, Soneium, and Aptos each generate less than $1,000. The proposal cites oracle, monitoring, and operational support costs but does not quantify the shortfall.The same ARFC separately targets 50 individual reserves and 21 matured Pendle principal tokens across 11 deployments, with $85.3 million supplied and $11.5 million borrowed. Those balances sit outsid...