Aave

Aave is a London-based company offering an open-source, non-custodial protocol that utilizes liquidity pools to facilitate lending and borrowing of crypto assets. Its users earn interest with deposits, or they take out loans by using the deposits as collateral.

Founded by Stani Kulechov, Aave is a decentralized finance protocol created for borrowing and lending, which performs an identical role to money markets in traditional finance. The platform enables users to deposit digital assets into liquidity pools, earn interest in the form of aTokens, and borrow digital assets through over-collateralized loans. Aave offers Flash Loans—a short-term loan mechanism.

Aave launched as ETHLend, but rebranded to its current form in September 2018. As ETHLend, it raised $600,000 in Ether in November 2017. The team consists of 19 members coming from a diverse background.

The platform is governed by AAVE token holders who ensure collateralized liquidity and vote on platform management. Aave is a DeFi platform built on Ethereum and accommodates ETH, a suite of stablecoins like DAI and USDC, and a variety of ERC-20 tokens from around the decentralized finance ecosystem.