The governance body for decentralized lending protocol Aave will start voting on Friday to decide whether or not to deploy its third version on BNB Chain.
If approved, users on BNB Chain, the blockchain network associated with Binance, would be able to borrow assets and deposit cryptocurrencies as collateral through Aave’s smart contracts. These assets include BNB, WBTC, BETH, WETH, USDC and USDT. Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume.
“Aave would gain access to BNB Chain’s user base, DeFi ecosystem, and potential additional revenue,” the proposal’s author, Marc Zeller, wrote in Aave’s forum discussion. “In return, BNB Chain would benefit from having a flagship DeFi project like Aave on its platform, further diversifying DeFi options available to its users.”
Read More: A Short Guide to Aave, DeFi’s Largest Lending Protocol
Friday’s vote is the latest in Aave’s efforts to expand to other blockchain networks beyond the current Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base. Stani Kulechov, founder of Avara, the software development firm behind Aave, predicted on X that Aave V3 will be deployed on Scroll, zkSync, Polygon’s zkEVM, Celo, as well as BNB Chain, in 2024, based on preliminary votes.
The vote to deploy Aave V3 was also created one day after Aave Labs proposed a strategy for integrating Aave’s native stablecoin GHO across several blockchain networks by leveraging Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). The protocol enables smart contracts on one blockchain to communicate and interact with smart contracts on another blockchain.
The proposal to deploy GHO cross-chain is in the beginning stage compared to the governance vote to deploy Aave V3 on BNB Chain as community members are still discussing the details of the GHO proposal and not actively voting on it.
Data from blockchain analytics firm DefiLlama shows Aave has more than $7.3 billion in locked value in its smart contracts, while BNB Chain has roughly $3.7 billion in total value locked.
