Stani Kulechov
Founder & CEO, Aave Labs
He shipped a rework of Aave's lending protocol in 2026, and argues that the infrastructure built for crypto-native assets should now carry every asset class arriving onchain.
Why the room needs them.
Stani Kulechov spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 as Founder & CEO of Aave Labs, taking two sessions on the Hecto Main Stage nine weeks after Aave V4 went live on Ethereum mainnet. On a panel with Robinhood, BlackRock and a Bloomberg moderator, his case was that lending infrastructure built for crypto-native assets should now carry tokenised real-world ones. He is billed on the summit's archived 2024 and 2025 speaker lists as well.
The full account.
Stani Kulechov founded ETHLend in 2017, and the Aave protocol followed in 2020. He is founder and chief executive of Aave Labs, which describes itself as the original author and contributor to Aave, and which in February 2026 retired the Avara umbrella brand, moving the Aave mobile app, Aave Pro and Aave Kit under the Aave Labs name and winding down the Family wallet.
He spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 as Founder & CEO of Aave Labs, taking two sessions on the Hecto Main Stage on 3 June. The first was a fireside, "Aave V4: Scaling Onchain Lending", moderated by Jacquelyn Melinek. The second was a panel on scaling the distribution layer for tokenised markets, shared with Robinhood's Johann Kerbrat, Tom Zschach and BlackRock's digital assets director Nikhil Sharma, moderated by Bloomberg ETF analyst Henry Jim. It was not his first Proof of Talk. The archived 2024 speaker list bills him "Aave, Founder and CEO", and the 2025 list "Founder, Avara/Aave Labs".
Aave V4 had gone live on Ethereum mainnet on 30 March 2026, nine weeks before the Paris edition, running alongside V3 rather than replacing it, after the deployment proposal cleared the Aave DAO's request-for-comment stage in four days with unanimous support. DL News called it the first complete rework of the protocol since V1. The design is hub-and-spoke: three liquidity hubs, Prime, Core and Plus, supply independent spokes that carry their own parameters and a credit line capped by the hub. Lido, EtherFi, Kelp, Ethena and Lombard ran spokes at launch. By July 2026 V4 had made its first deployment beyond Ethereum, on Avalanche.
V4 was one of three pillars in a plan he published in December 2025, aimed at moving, in his words, "the next trillion dollars in assets and the next several million users onchain". The others were Horizon, a permissioned Ethereum market launched in August 2025 in which institutions borrow stablecoins against tokenised real-world assets while anyone can supply GHO, RLUSD or USDC to earn yield from them, and a consumer Aave App, whose waitlist opened in November 2025. His argument for the app was that DeFi had been reaching professional users and not much beyond them. In August 2026 he said deposits across the protocol had passed $30 billion, with roughly $10 billion in active loans.
What Stani believes about the next ten years.
Years of shipping.
Lines that keep proving correct.
“Aave v4 is actually taking Aave into a new environment where we can start funding opportunities in the real world.”
“What is the future for Aave? It's about using the infrastructure we've built, which is successful with native crypto assets, and applying that to all asset classes that are coming onchain. There is an enormous opportunity with RWAs.”
“Typically, DeFi has been accessible to very savvy, professional users. The next step for DeFi is to bring more direct access for consumers.”
What they have built, written, and backed.
Built
- Aave V4Called by DL News the first complete rework of the Aave protocol since V1. Live on Ethereum mainnet on 30 March 2026 and running alongside V3, it uses three liquidity hubs, Prime, Core and Plus, feeding independent spokes that carry their own parameters and a hub-capped credit line. Lido, EtherFi, Kelp, Ethena and Lombard ran spokes at launch, and Avalanche followed as the first deployment beyond Ethereum.
- HorizonA permissioned Ethereum lending market launched in August 2025, where qualified institutions borrow stablecoins against tokenised real-world assets and anyone can supply GHO, RLUSD or USDC to earn yield from those borrowers. Circle, Securitize, VanEck, WisdomTree, Chainlink and Centrifuge were among the launch network.
- The Aave AppA consumer savings product for Apple's App Store, funded by bank transfer or debit card and built on stablecoins and the Aave protocol. Its waitlist opened on 17 November 2025, with a stated minimum rate of 5 per cent at announcement.
- LensThe social protocol his team built, with onchain content storage governed by smart contracts. Lens raised $31 million in December 2024 led by Lightspeed Faction, and Lens Chain reached mainnet in April 2025 on the ZKsync stack, using Avail for data availability and Aave's GHO stablecoin for gas. Mask Network took over stewardship of the protocol in January 2026.
The next Proof of Talk is in Abu Dhabi.
Louvre Abu Dhabi, 3–4 December 2026. Admission is by application, and the room is capped at 2,000.
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