Aave has launched its V4 lending upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet today, introducing a hub-and-spoke architecture that centralizes liquidity while isolating risk.
The rollout follows almost a year of audits, testnet trials, and governance reviews, and was approved by the DAO with strong support.
In the new design, Liquidity Hubs hold assets and enforce global risk caps, while Spokes define individual markets and draw liquidity from the shared hub through credit lines.
Risk analysts such as Chaos Labs and LlamaRisk say the structure pools liquidity centrally but isolates risk at the spoke level, reducing fragmentation.
V4 also adds support for real-world asset collateral, fixed-rate borrowing, and institutional credit lines, expanding the protocol's market reach.
Each network will operate at least one Liquidity Hub, and the DAO can create separate hubs for conservative stablecoin liquidity or higher-risk strategies.
Founder Stani Kulechov describes V4 as a unified liquidity layer where shared liquidity coexists with modular risk.