Solana 🤝 Aave

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]You made some pretty major waves across the industry on Saturday. I got a flurry of text messages about a whole bunch of topics. And now Ave is listed on Solana.

[00:00:09]So, tell us a little bit about kind of how that came about. I think a lot of people reacted very, very positively to you guys crossing the L1 line and and being active around something that that a lot of people didn't expect. So, Yeah, well, we had the Drift hack, of course, what, maybe 3 weeks ago at this point.

[00:00:26]And then when Ave had that happen, I should say when when that happened to help down in RS ETH and then the onward contagion to Ave main market. If people lose confidence in DeFi overall, that's just bad for everybody. So, there's just certain times every cycle when, you know, you can spend 99% of your time competing with one another.

[00:00:45]But then there's every so often it's important to pull up and be like, well, as an industry we're still so miniature compared to how global finance works. As an industry, we should be really proud of things like, you know, stable coins getting so much adoption in such a short period of time. DeFi for going from this theoretical thing to actually moving billions, if not trillions of dollars, and being really actively used by tens and maybe even 100 million people around the world. So, that's amazing for us as an industry. But then there's existential times when there can be kind of like more structural loss of confidence in what we're all doing as an industry. As we were observing what was happening with Ave over the last couple of weeks, I think that was one of those times where there's just like these defining moments when you either get a good outcome or things just kind of wither away. And I know that in crypto, like a big part of the origins of crypto is like the Occupy Wall Street huge aversion to the bailouts that happened in 2008. That's like such a big cultural part of crypto. But I don't think that a community responding in support of one another to instill confidence is a bailout. I think sometimes people have such a binary view that if something goes wrong, everything should just fall over and die. And it's like a very simplistic view of what ultimately blockchain is about, a community being able to create value.

[00:02:02]And to ideally be able to hold onto that value as well. So, I think it's been awesome to see also the Ethereum community come together and all of the donations come together in order to try to resolve the bad debt in Ave cuz they see how existential Ave is. It's the most singularly important lending protocol to DeFi on Ethereum. And I would argue because blockchain is DeFi, probably the most existentially important to Ethereum as a whole. And if that were to have a loss of confidence, I think it'd be a pretty short-sighted and pretty petty way to look at it would be to say, "Oh, my competitor is suffering. Therefore, that's good for me." That's just really not the way we see it.