Aave Founder Sees Tokenized Stock Lending Overtaking Crypto Lending Next Year

Tokenized Stocks Enter Aave's Credit Engine

Aave founder Stani Kulechov said on Wednesday at TOKEN2049 that lending against tokenized stocks and other real-world assets will overtake native crypto lending on the DeFi protocol next year. Speaking on a panel moderated by a16z crypto investment partner Robbie Petersen, alongside Ethena CEO Guy Young and Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, Kulechov put Aave's peak liquidity last year at $76 billion, with Ethena's USDe standing around $15 billion. USDe at that size has grown into one of the larger balances in on-chain credit, which is why the three founders shared a stage at all: their protocols sit at the center of the sector's liquidity pools. That scale, Kulechov argued, is what lets technology proven on native crypto assets be redeployed for tokenized traditional instruments without starting over. Weeks before the discussion, Aave rolled out its V4 Equities Hub on Base, accepting seven Coinbase tokenized stocks as collateral for USDC loans, a step that turns the forecast into live product rather than panel talk. He framed the shift as an extension of Aave's core design: the same validation logic applied to native crypto assets now screens tokenized equities, and each added collateral type deepens the network's borrowable liquidity. Kulechov said borrowing against on-chain shares currently runs near 5%, cheaper than traditional over-the-counter stock lending, and he expects equity and RWA collateral to outgrow native crypto collateral as early as next year. The token's tape did not follow the optimism on the day: our live monitoring shows the Aave price about 5% lower over the past 24 hours, and on-chain activity shows an Aave-linked wallet sold 50,000 AAVE for 8 million USDC in a week, adding supply pressure while the sector's founders pitched expansion.

Banks Pay 0.5%, DeFi Hands 5%

Bear-market memory shaped much of the product logic on stage. Ethena CEO Guy Young described how the 2022–2023 downturn forced a redesign: crypto yields had collapsed toward zero while real-world risk-free rates paid 5%, so price volatility alone could not keep users engaged or keep teams funded. Out of that stretch came the RWA infrastructure Ethena now pitches, and a deliberate choice of savings applications over trading ones that produced Ethena Pay. Synthetix founder Kain Warwick read the same period from a different angle. Regulatory uncertainty and risk, he said, make altcoins harder to invest in than conventional stocks, so rails built for crypto tokens ended up carrying tokenized equities instead. Synthetix once kept to the contract layer and rewarded third parties for front ends, a model that produced five different interfaces and poor user experience; he now runs Infinex, which owns the front end while the backend stays neutral. The next wave of token adoption, in his view, waits on regulatory clarity so token and equity models can merge. The consumer pitch sharpened the contrast with banks. Young said traditional deposits pay 0.5% or nothing while institutions keep the spread, whereas DeFi hands 5% or more directly to users, who retain custody of their own private keys. Because protocols run on smart contracts rather than thousands of compliance and legal staff per jurisdiction, he put the cost advantage near 95%. Kulechov added that Aave operates as a credit network, not a bank: each new liquidity addition compounds network effects, cutting borrower funding costs and lifting lender efficiency. The build-out continues in parallel: a live proposal would accept Anchorage-custodied Bitcoin collateral for V4 loans, and on-chain data shows AAVE whales added 190,000 tokens, about $30 million, since September 28.

AI Agents and the Trust Premium

Petersen's closing question set the frame: if AI agents optimize idle cash until zero-interest deposits disappear, where do DeFi protocols earn? Warwick called the end of interest-free checking inevitable and said capital will pool in protocols with long operating records, Aave's uptime creating a trust premium traditional finance cannot copy. Young called the profit source “packaging trust”: a protocol that survives cycles without losing user funds cuts funding costs and gains pricing power. Kulechov added that AI agents open accounts on-chain more easily than at a bank, and AI-driven transactions will outnumber human ones. Our reading: the answers follow the premise more than any measured capital shift, and the exact wording of that closing question is not on the public record.