Aave's Kulechov: RWAs to hit $100B by year-end

Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave Labs, used a sit-down with The Block to lay out a bullish roadmap for real-world assets onchain, predicting the category will double to $100 billion by December. The conversation anchored on Aave V4's planned Avalanche deployment and the protocol's ambition to chip away at traditional prime brokerage.

Why it matters

Kulechov's $100 billion call is roughly a 2x from current RWA TVL, and the timing matters: tokenized treasuries and private credit have been the dominant on-chain growth vertical for two consecutive quarters. Tying that growth to Aave V4, which introduces a unified liquidity layer and modular architecture, reframes Aave from a lending app into core settlement infrastructure for tokenized credit.

Market impact

The Avalanche angle is the underappreciated beat. Aave V4 expanding beyond Ethereum mainnet and its L2s gives institutional credit desks a chain with sub-second finality and predictable fees, two traits Treasuries and money-market funds price in at the mandate level. If V4 onboarding pulls even a slice of the $50 billion-plus tokenized credit pipeline onto Avalanche, AAVE holders get a fee-routing tailwind while AVAX benefits from validator-level activity. Watch for V4 mainnet timing and the first named institutional credit originators using the unified liquidity layer.