AAVE · a revenue buyback quietly edges out the last of the emission.
AAVE is the governance token of the Aave lending protocol on Ethereum — ~15.18M circulating, hard-capped at 16M with no mint function, so nothing is inflated into existence.
Sell pressure. The Ecosystem Reserve streams about 0.014M AAVE to Safety Module stakers over the next 90 days — the only new float on a capped supply.
Buy pressure. A revenue-funded buyback takes roughly 0.026M AAVE off the market and holds it in the DAO reserve — not burned.
Net. About 0.08% taken off the market over 90 days — supply roughly steady, tilting a touch deflationary.
AAVE is hard-capped at 16M with no mint function — the protocol cannot issue new tokens, so there is no ongoing inflation.
The 2020 LEND-to-AAVE migration is long finished and every original allocation has fully vested — no team, seed or investor cliff reaches the market.
The staking safety system streams about 150 AAVE a day (~0.014M over 90 days) from the Ecosystem Reserve to stakers as rewards, after governance cut the rate from ~220 a day in Jun 2026. Around 0.82M AAVE sits outside the float in the Ecosystem Reserve and the DAO Collector — which also receives the bought-back AAVE — both tracked team-controlled overhangs.
No bankruptcy estate or court-ordered distribution applies to AAVE.
The protocol spends revenue buying AAVE on the open market at about 292 AAVE a day (~0.026M over 90 days). Aavenomics 3.0 made the buyback automatic and non-discretionary in Jun 2026, funded by protocol and GHO revenue up to a $30M-a-year budget. The bought AAVE is held in the DAO Collector, not burned.
AAVE has no fee-burn mechanism — protocol revenue funds the buyback instead of destroying tokens. Governance has floated an optional future burn but none is live.
The DAO's open-market buying is the programmatic buyback in Buy #1 — there is no separate discretionary purchase to book.
No new multi-year lock or escrow was announced in the window — monitored.
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