How Aave runs the largest lending protocol in DeFi across 20+ chains with Alchemy

A lending protocol never closes. Positions move, prices move, and users watch their health factors at every hour of the day, deciding when to supply, borrow, repay, or withdraw. If the data behind that view goes stale for even a moment, a user can lose an accurate picture of their money at exactly the moment it matters most. Aave is the largest onchain credit protocol in decentralized finance, and it has run its traffic on Alchemy since 2021.

Products used: Node RPC API, Wallet APIs, Gasless Transactions, Prices API, Transfers API, and Portfolio API.

$3 trillion moved, one protocol, 20+ chains

Aave is a global network for lending, borrowing, and saving. People deposit crypto or stablecoins to earn interest, or use what they've deposited as collateral to borrow against instantly. It all runs on smart contracts that anyone can inspect, open at any hour, with no bank and no paperwork. Aave also issues GHO, its own stablecoin, backed by more collateral than the value it puts into circulation.

The scale is hard to overstate: $3 trillion in all-time deposits and $1 trillion in all-time loans since it launched. In March 2026, Aave launched its biggest upgrade yet, V4, on Ethereum. All deposits on a network sit in a shared vault called a Liquidity Hub, and individual markets, called Spokes, borrow from that shared pool while each sets its own rules for what counts as collateral and how much can be borrowed. Now many markets can draw from the same deep pool, so money is used more efficiently and Aave can stand up a new specialized market without starting its liquidity from scratch. V4 opened with three of these hubs, each tuned for a different appetite:

• Core, the main general-purpose venue that holds the most assets
• Prime, a conservative option for people who want to hold blue-chip collateral like ETH and BTC without lending it out
• Plus, built for strategy-heavy stablecoin activity behind its own limits

V4 crossed $275M in deposits in under four months, all during a deliberately cautious, security-first rollout. Aave Labs also builds products people use directly, including Aave Pro, the web app for V4, and the Aave App, a mobile savings app.

Anyone with a compatible wallet can use Aave, from individual crypto users to DAOs, funds, fintechs, and a growing number of regulated institutions. They all want the same things: plenty of money available to borrow, risk managed carefully and out in the open, and infrastructure that simply works. Because Aave never closes, people are checking their positions, moving money in and out, and having loans settled at every hour of the day. That means every layer underneath, all the way down to the raw connection to each blockchain, has to be accurate, live, and dependable on every network Aave runs on.

Data accuracy is critical for money

Aave runs across more than 20 networks, including Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and more. The Aave interface, the Aave API, indexing pipelines, the Aave App, and Aave Pro all depend on high volumes of low-latency, historically complete RPC data.

The load is also spiky. Product launches, indexer backfills, record deposit days, and network upgrades can push traffic well beyond baseline. Self-hosting archive nodes across more than 20 networks, each with its own client quirks and upgrade schedule, would consume engineering time the team needs for the protocol itself.

RPC quality is directly user-facing for a lending protocol. If data goes stale or an endpoint degrades, users lose an accurate view of their positions and health factors, and they can miss the window to supply or repay. Any solution had to deliver exchange-grade reliability on every chain, at any traffic level, at any hour.

One reliable partner for protocol and consumer product

Alchemy powers Aave's data traffic across more than 100 apps, on every network Aave has expanded to. But Aave is really two products with two different jobs: the protocol, where data has to be accurate and always on, and a consumer app, where the crypto has to disappear for the user. Alchemy sits under both.

Keeping the protocol always on

On the protocol side, Alchemy carries the data traffic behind the interface, the API, and the indexing pipelines, spanning the V3 and V4 API instances.

The backbone is Alchemy's Node RPC APIs across more than 20 networks, with WebSockets for live updates and the Prices, Transfers, and Portfolio and Token Balances APIs feeding the data the interface and indexers read.

Alchemy always stayed a step ahead. Before the Aave API went live, Alchemy reached out first to confirm throughput expectations and raised limits in advance, so the launch had headroom before it needed it. And when Alchemy built Cortex, its intelligent blockchain engine, Aave was among the first teams on it, migrating 83% of its traffic within a month. Aave now runs 3-5x faster with Cortex doing the heavy lifting for Aave's indexing and backfills.

Making crypto disappear for users

The Aave App has a different bar than a protocol interface. It has to feel as simple as any fintech app, which means the crypto mechanics fade into the background.

So the Aave App runs on Alchemy's Wallet APIs, using sophisticated programmable wallet and transaction infrastructure to abstract away gas fees and complexity. This was a deliberate choice about keeping users in control. Because the wallet can hold its own logic, Aave can take the mechanics off the user, moving funds and covering gas, while the security guarantees stay enforced at the account level. To the person using the app, it feels like a seamless, gasless experience, and every action still maps back to a decision they made.

Every milestone, completed without a hitch

Alchemy has scaled with Aave through every major milestone while Aave's team stayed focused on development. In March 2026, Aave launched V4, the latest protocol iteration, which passed $275M in deposits in less than four months. Aave V3 expanded to new networks like MegaETH, where Aave's market cleared $1B in deposits within weeks of launch. The Aave API launch produced traffic spikes above 2M compute units per second (~70k req/s), and Alchemy absorbed them without incident. Migrating to Cortex cut latency 3-5x, and a single enterprise platform now powers more than 100 apps across the Aave ecosystem.

Aave built on Alchemy for three reasons:

• Coverage and completeness on every chain. One provider across more than 20 networks, with the archive depth and historical completeness a lending protocol needs, so the interface, API, and indexers all read the same reliable data. Plus, proactive new chain support means that Aave's users can reach new ecosystems on day 1 without Aave having to ask.
• Reliability at every scale. On quiet days and volatile ones alike, when spikes can jump to tens of thousands of requests per second, Alchemy keeps Aave's lending workloads fast and accurate, so users always see the truth about their positions.
• Infrastructure that stays ahead of the curve. Over years of building together, Alchemy has kept innovating on performance and given Aave first access to what's next, from early Cortex to programmable wallet and transaction infrastructure. When Aave needs something, Alchemy ships it in weeks, at times contributing the fix upstream to Geth, the software that runs most of Ethereum, so the whole ecosystem benefits.

Build on the infrastructure Aave trusts

The next phase for Aave is scale in every direction. Aave Labs is rolling out specialized markets, called Spokes, across V4's Hub and Spoke architecture, and growing the Aave App into a mainstream consumer DeFi experience. Aave Horizon, the largest RWA lending market for regulated and permissioned assets, migrates onto V4 in 2026, unlocking a broader set of institutional collateral types.

Aave shows what it takes to run the largest lending protocol in DeFi across more than 20 networks: exchange-grade RPC data that stays accurate and reliable at any hour and any traffic level.

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