DeFi Blue-Chip Token Aave Up 17% Amid Latest Upgrade

The latest upgrade to lending and borrowing protocol Aave has been greeted with a swell of buying activity.

The project's native ERC-20 token AAVE, which is used for staking and governance on the platform, has risen by more than 17% over the past 24 hours, according to data pulled from CoinMarketCap.

At press time, AAVE is trading at just over $147, a price that is still nearly 80% lower than the token's all-time high of $632, hit back in May 2021.

Aave's latest price action has primarily been driven by the launch of its long-awaited "V3" upgrade.

Updates include integrations with various Layer-2 scaling solutions, optimizations for gas costs, tons of new crypto wallet integrations, and more.

First called ETHLend in 2017, Aave is the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector's largest protocol by total value locked (essentially another way of saying how much money is held inside a project).

According to DeFi Llama, a data dashboard for all things DeFi, Aave commands a whopping $19.37 billion. With the entire sector holding more than $250 billion, this gives Aave a roughly 7% slice of the market.

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Runner ups include decentralized exchange (DEX) Curve Finance and the Terra-based Anchor Protocol.

The rest of the DeFi market

Elsewhere in the DeFi market, other blue-chip tokens in Maker (MKR) and Synthetix (SNX) have also enjoyed hefty double-digit jumps, with both tokens up over 10% in the past 24 hours.

Maker is DeFi's central bank of sorts, turning Ethereum deposits into the stablecoin DAI. The loans are overcollateralized, meaning you must deposit more Ethereum (in terms of dollars) than you’ll receive in DAI. Still, it's one of the oldest decentralized stablecoins on the market.

For its part, Synthetix came to the fore promising various crypto versions of more traditional assets like gold, oil, stocks, bonds, and also cryptocurrencies for use within the Synthetix ecosystem.

Compound, another Ethereum-based lending protocol, is also up over 7%, while SushiSwap, a forked iteration of the popular DEX Uniswap, has also risen over 8% over the past 24 hours.

As for Ethereum, the base network upon which these DeFi projects were built, is currently up over 3% on the day and nearly 7% over the week.