Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov has outlined the decentralized lending protocol’s priorities for 2026, focusing on infrastructure upgrades, institutional markets, and consumer adoption. The update followed a period of strong growth in 2025, marked by record deposits and higher on-chain activity.
Central to the roadmap is Aave V4, a planned protocol upgrade designed to introduce cross-chain liquidity, a modular architecture, and more customizable lending markets. The upgrade shows Aave’s effort to position itself as a scalable infrastructure for both decentralized finance and institutional use cases, as competition among lending protocols intensifies.
The roadmap also highlights Horizon, Aave’s real-world asset lending market, and the expansion of its mobile app. Horizon aims to attract institutional partners through tokenized assets, while the mobile app targets broader retail adoption by offering a simplified, savings-style experience aligned with mainstream fintech expectations.
