Aave

Aave, originally known as ETHLend, was founded by Stani Kulechov. Kulechov is a serial entrepreneur who went to law school and started programming at a young age. He was an early adopter in the blockchain space. The project was launched in November 2017 as ETHLend, a decentralized finance lending protocol. In September 2018, the project was rebranded to Aave, which means "ghost" in Finnish.

Aave's open-source protocol is built on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is currently in the process of transitioning from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism. The move to Proof-of-Stake is expected to improve the security and energy efficiency of the Ethereum network, which in turn secures the Aave protocol. The Proof-of-Stake model relies on network validators who stake their Ether to validate transactions, rather than the energy-intensive mining process used in Proof-of-Work.

The circulating supply of AAVE tokens is linked to the total value locked (TVL) on the Aave platform, as tokens are burned whenever the protocol collects fees. An initial coin offering (ICO) was held in November 2017, where $16.2 million was raised by selling one billion AAVE tokens at a rate of $0.0162 per token. In July 2020, Aave announced plans to hold a token swap, where the existing 1.3 billion AAVE tokens in circulation would be swapped for the newly minted AAVE cryptocurrency at a ratio of 1:100. This created a total supply of 16 million AAVE, with 3 million tokens held in reserve.