AAVE Leads Top 40 Cryptocurrencies With 19% Surge in One Day — Here’s What Could Be Driving It

AAVE surged nearly 19% to $355 over the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk Data, leading the top 40 cryptocurrencies by percentage daily gain as investors responded to its recent Aptos expansion and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s dovish remarks.

What Aave is and why it matters

Aave is a decentralized finance protocol that lets users lend and borrow cryptocurrencies without intermediaries. Loans are managed by smart contracts, with borrowers required to post collateral valued above their loans.

The AAVE token underpins this system. It can be staked to support security and earn rewards, used as collateral for borrowing and grant holders governance rights. In return, tokenholders gain voting power and fee benefits, making AAVE central to protocol operations.

Aptos expansion

On Aug. 21, Aave Labs announced that Aave V3 had gone live on Aptos, its first deployment on a non-EVM blockchain. Developers rewrote the codebase in the Move language, rebuilt the user interface and adapted the protocol for the Aptos virtual machine.

The launch was supported by audits, a mainnet capture-the-flag competition, and a $500,000 bug bounty. The first market supports assets including APT, sUSDe, USDT and USDC, with supply and borrow caps to be raised gradually. Chaos Labs and Llama Risk conducted risk assessments, and Chainlink provided price feeds.

Aave Labs founder and CEO Stani Kulechov called the launch “an incredible milestone,” highlighting the shift beyond EVM chains after five years of exclusivity.

Jerome Powell’s Dovish Jackson Hole speech

Fed Chair Jerome Powell's speech on Friday morning at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium added momentum. Powell said the balance of risks between inflation and employment had shifted, signaling that interest rate cuts could begin in September.

Markets viewed his remarks as dovish, with CME FedWatch data showing expectations for a quarter-point cut in September rising to 83% from 75% earlier in the week. U.S. equities and crypto have rallied broadly since Powell's speech, with AAVE among the biggest movers.

WLFI exposure rumors

Another factor one analyst claims may not be fully priced in is Aave’s alleged exposure to WLFI, the governance token of World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the DeFi project associated with Donald Trump’s family.

In October 2024, the startup proposed launching its own Aave V3 instance on Ethereum mainnet.

The proposal stated:

"AaveDAO will receive:

20% of the protocol fees generated by the WLF Aave v3 instanceApproximately 7% of the total supply of $WLFI tokens for:Participation in WLF Governance proceduresLiquidity miningPromoting decentralization of the WLF platform"

It also stated:"This proposal is subject to both AaveDAO governance approval and World Liberty Financial community approval."

An X user claiming to be an analyst at Delphi Digital noted on Saturday that with WLFI’s token set to begin trading Sept. 1 at an implied $27.3 billion valuation, Aave’s allocation could be worth around $1.9 billion — more than a third of its current $5 billion fully diluted valuation. He argued that this alleged exposure may be contributing to AAVE’s rally, even if investors are only now revisiting its significance.

According to a post on X by WU Blockchain published at 4:16 p.m. UTC on Saturday, the WLFI team is saying that the claim that "Aave will receive 7% of the total WLFI token supply" is false.

The post stated:

"The WLFI team told WuBlockchain that the claim that 'Aave will receive 7% of the total WLFI token supply' is false and fake news. Previously, a community member claimed that, according to a previously released proposal, AaveDAO would receive 20% of the protocol fees generated by the WLFI Aave v3 instance and approximately 7% of the total WLFI token supply."

Technical analysis highlights

According to CoinDesk Research's technical analysis data model, AAVE posted significant gains during the 24-hour trading period from Aug. 22 at 12:00 UTC to Aug. 23 at 11:00 UTC, climbing from $297.75 to $353.22 — an 18.65% increase that reflects growing confidence in the platform’s expansion strategy.The digital asset traded within a $62.11 range, fluctuating between $294.50 and $356.60, with the most pronounced price movement occurring at 14:00 UTC on Aug. 22 when trading volume reached 340,907 units, significantly exceeding the daily average of 102,554 units.Sustained buying pressure was observed during the final hour of the analysis period from 10:49 UTC to 11:48 UTC on Aug. 23, with AAVE advancing from $349.61 to $353.79. Trading volumes consistently exceeded 3,000 units during key price levels at $352.55, $353.98, and $355.52, compared to the session average of 1,647 units, indicating what market participants describe as methodical institutional positioning.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk's full AI Policy.

Updated at 6:19 p.m. UTC on Aug. 23 to include more information about Aave's alleged exposure to the WLFI token, especially the X post by WU Blockchain published at 4:16 p.m. UTC on Aug. 23, which claimed that the rumor about Aave DAO receiving 7% of the total supply of the WLFI is false.