After becoming the first DeFi protocol on Ethereum (ETH), in terms of deposited value (TVL), Aave now wants to tackle the institutional investor market. The latter actually wants to deploy specific pools for its new target in order to meet a “significant demand from various institutions”.
Aave opens up to institutions
The information had leaked last May, when an Internet user had unfortunately found himself on an error page stating that his account had been blacklisted for non-compliance with anti-money laundering rules.
Very quickly, Stani Kulechov, the co-founder of Aave, reassured users that it was a bug and that the error screen was part of a new product for institutional investors.
So, more recently, the Aave teams sent an email to attendees of the “Next Steps in Institutional DeFi” webinar, informing them of the imminent release of Aave Pro, the much-touted product dedicated to institutional investors.
What is Aave Pro?
Aave Pro is a separate platform, independent from the classic Aave protocol. It offers several pools that will only be accessible to institutional investors who have completed the KYC and anti-money laundering procedures provided by the company Fireblocks.
“Aave Pro uses the thoroughly tested and audited V2 smart contracts and adds a whitelist layer so that only KYC-checked participants can access the Aave Pro pool.”
Email sent by Aave
Initially, these pools will only support 4 assets: bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), USDC and AAVE.
Finally, the email reveals that a decentralization of the governance of Aave Pro will be realized in the future. It remains to be seen whether Aave will use its own token or create a new token for the occasion.
Unfortunately, the TVL of the protocol has been largely impacted by the drop in the price of cryptos the last few weeks. Indeed, Aave has gone from $22 billion to $16 billion in deposits in the space of a month.
