A governance delegation platform for Aave, the largest decentralized lending platform, with more than $29 billion in total value locked (TVL), has proposed pausing three underutilized Layer 2 deployments of Aave V3.
In a January 29 board proposal that was turned into a snapshot on February 3, the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) proposed that Aave freeze its V3 deployments on Ethereum L2s zkSync Era, Metis and Soneium to save costs.
“Over time, it has become apparent that a small subset of agencies contribute very little user activity, TVL, and revenue, while still requiring a non-trivial amount of attention from service providers and governance participants,” ACI wrote in the prospal.
The proposed reduction in L2 deployments aims to “reduce operational overhead and administrative burden by addressing cases that are clearly not viable today.”
Of the three networks, zkSync currently has the largest TVL at about $26 million, followed by Soneium at $21.6 million and Metis at $11.7 million, according to DefiLlama data.
In the past 30 days, Aave generated just $714 in revenue on zkSync, $679 on Metis, and just $150 on Soneium, per DefiLlama. For comparison, within the same time frame, Aave made over $7.7 million on Ethereum and almost $298,000 on Base.
Now ACI is pushing for stricter conditions for future expansions. The proposal calls for any new on-chain implementation to guarantee Aave annual revenue of at least $2 million, arguing that the protocol’s liquidity is often underpriced given its “upfront and recurring costs.”
The snapshot on the proposal, which runs until February 7, has so far received unanimous support, with 257,300 votes in favor and none against.
Voting began on the same day that Ethereum’s broader scaling strategy came under renewed scrutiny. As The Defiant reported earlier this week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an X-post arguing that the rollup-focused roadmap for the network “no longer makes sense,” and that L2s should focus on other use cases.