AAVE is a decentralized non-custodial liquidity market protocol where users can participate as depositors or borrowers. Depositors provide liquidity to the market to earn a passive income, while borrowers are able to borrow in an over collateralized or undercollateralized fashion. The AAVE Protocol is completely open-source, which allows anyone to interact with a user interface client, API or directly with the smart contracts on the Ethereum network.

AAVE token is the ERC-20 native governance token of the AAVE Network. AAVE previously had the LEND ticker, which it changed during the rebranding. The AAVE cryptocurrency is used in the protocol for governance.

AAVE was founded by Stani Kulechov in 2017.  Stani Kulechov and engineers launched ETHLend as an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in November 2017. The following 4 people were the key members of the early AAVE founding team:

Stani Kulechov - Founder & CEO

He is the Founder and Chief Executive officer of AAVE. He was studying law at the University of Helsinki when he first got into Ethereum and started exploring how it could impact the traditional financial system. He released ETHLend in 2017 and since then he made his mission to create tools for an open, transparent, and equitable financial ecosystem through AAVE Protocol.

Jordan Lazaro Gustave - Chief Operating Officer

Ernesto Boado - Chief Technology Officer

Peter Kerr - Chief Financial Officer

In October 2020, AAVE announced the official handover of admin keys to governance contracts controlled by the AAVE token holders, allowing decentralized governance votes to have direct control over changes to the protocol. At present, AAVE is a fully decentralized, community governed protocol with 110,739 token holders. Now, AAVE community has the control to preserve and build on the work of the original developers and help bring AAVE to the forefront of the growing DeFi industry and the AAVE founding team will be one of the core developers of the protocol in the future and will build what the community wants.