Aave

Aave v3 wstETH

Aave V3 wstETH is a lending pool on Ethereum Core Market where users supply wrapped staked ETH to earn lending interest. Yield comes from borrower interest payments, while wstETH also serves as primary collateral for ETH-correlated E-Mode borrowing strategies.

AUM

$3.33b+8.06%

Supply APY

0.00%

BBB+Rated Protocol

Updated Mar 16, 2026

Risk Rating

BBB+

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This rating is based solely on publicly available information. The range from BBB+ to AA reflects the gap between the current assessment and the potential rating achievable if all identified improvement areas are addressed.

SCS: Smart Contract Security

KMP: Key Management Permissions

M: Market

L: Liquidity

C: Collateral

PM: Protocol Mechanics

ICE: Infra Counterparty Exposures

PCE: Protocol Counterparty Exposures

G: Governance

FR: Financial Resilience

TLC: Team Legal Compliance

DT: Documentation Transparency

Potential Score

Provider risk assessed across Business, Operations, Reliability, and Security.

View the detailed scoring breakdown

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Contract Addresses

aEthwstETH

0x0B92...9371

Collector

0x464C...e18c

ACLManager

0xc2aa...dd42

LendingPool

0x8787...A4E2

wstETH Token

0x7f39...2Ca0

PoolConfigurator

0x64b7...bB27

PoolAddressesProvider

0x2f39...4E9e

Key Strengths

Extensive audit coverage from top security firms including OpenZeppelin, Trail of Bits, and Certora formal verification, with continuous coverage through V3.6
Large-scale protocol with wstETH pool at $3.73B and conservative 4.08% utilization providing ample withdrawal liquidity under normal conditions
Robust governance structure with two 5-of-9 Guardian multisigs, timelocked execution, on-chain DAO voting, and over 1,100 automated parameter updates via Risk Stewards
Rapid incident response demonstrated during the March 2026 CAPO event with post-mortem within one day and full user reimbursement committed
SEC investigation closed in December 2025 without enforcement action, removing significant regulatory overhang

Key Risks

CAPO oracle misconfiguration in March 2026 caused wrongful E-Mode liquidations with no redundant fallback, and a near-identical issue one month earlier went undetected
E-Mode tight liquidation buffers (93% LTV / 95% LT) amplify any oracle or pricing error into large-scale liquidation cascades
Combined backstop reserves represent less than 1% of total protocol TVL, modest relative to the scale of potential exposure
Organizational instability from simultaneous departure of two critical service providers (BGD Labs and ACI) during 2026
Ongoing DAO-Labs governance tension over funding proposals and unresolved accountability framework for service provider errors
No published incident response playbook despite proven emergency response capability in practice