Aave V4 Goes Live on Ethereum Mainnet Introducing a "Center-Radius" Architecture

March 30th saw the official deployment of Aave V4—the fourth-generation decentralized lending protocol—on the Ethereum mainnet. Aave V4 features a new “hub-and-spoke” architecture, centralizing liquidity at the “hub” for various financial markets to connect via “spokes.” Each spoke can independently set risk parameters and lending environments, aiming to support a broader range of real-world credit markets, including structured loans, fixed-rate lending, and asset tokenization-backed credit. Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov noted the team will follow a “controlled launch” approach, initially governed by the DAO. At launch, major on-chain apps including Lido, EtherFi, Kelp, Ethena, and Lombard plan to deploy spokes first. For risk management, V4 introduces a “credit limit” mechanism that caps exposure limits for each use case. Additionally, the system supports more precise collateral-level risk pricing. Notably, V4 has undergone over a year of security testing, and its core protocol has never been hacked across multi-chain deployments. Kulechov added that V4 will prioritize the “borrowing side,” tapping into Aave’s on-chain liquidity to drive significant borrowing demand and channel it back to the real economy. This launch comes amid months of governance turmoil within Aave DAO. Kulechov recently put forward the “Aave Will Win” reform proposal, which aims to turn Aave Labs into a DAO subsidiary to streamline the governance structure.