Author: Flora, CryptoPulse Labs
Recently, news broke that Kraken plans to strategically invest in Aave, drawing widespread attention in the crypto market. It is reported that Kraken's parent company, Payward, is negotiating to acquire relevant equity and token assets of Aave to accelerate its layout in the DeFi asset management business.
Although Aave co-founder Stani Kulechov later clarified that there are inaccuracies in the valuation and transaction framework circulating in the market, the incident itself has already sent a strong signal—centralized trading platforms are accelerating their entry into the core areas of on-chain finance.
From the acquisition of derivatives platforms by exchanges to the betting on DeFi lending leaders, Kraken's actions reflect not only a strategic upgrade of a single company but also a new competition for control over the future financial infrastructure.
1. Kraken sets its sights on Aave: CeFi giants start competing for on-chain financial entry
On the surface, Kraken's interest in Aave stems from its asset management strategic expansion. Insiders revealed that this transaction is defined as Payward's first series of investments in asset management business.
This indicates that Kraken is no longer satisfied with being merely a trading matching platform but hopes to enter the financial services sector with higher profits and higher barriers. However, the logic behind this is not complicated.
In recent years, the main revenue of crypto exchanges has come from three types of businesses: spot trading, derivatives trading, and custody services. However, as industry competition intensifies and transaction fees continue to decline, exchanges must seek new growth curves.
DeFi conveniently provides this direction, as compared to traditional trading business, the value of DeFi lies in its inherent "on-chain asset management" properties.
Users are not just trading but also engaging in lending, staking, leverage, yield aggregation, and stablecoin management. These activities are essentially high-frequency financial services, with the customer lifetime value far exceeding that of simple trading users.
In the DeFi lending track, Aave is undoubtedly one of the most core infrastructures. Aave has long occupied the forefront of decentralized lending protocols' total value locked (TVL), with its core advantages being a mature lending model and risk parameter system, a strong liquidity moat, and an evolution from a single lending protocol to a complete financial ecosystem.
In other words, what Kraken may want to buy is not just AAVE tokens but the control over the gateway to future on-chain finance. The layout of Aave is essentially Kraken betting on the next generation of financial infrastructure.
2. After experiencing a black swan event, why is Aave deemed even more valuable?
From a traditional perspective, now may not seem like the best time to invest in Aave. After all, in April of this year, Aave experienced one of the most severe risk events in DeFi history.
At that time, hackers exploited a vulnerability in the KelpDAO cross-chain bridge, minting approximately $292 million of uncollateralized rsETH and using it as collateral to borrow real assets on Aave, resulting in bad debts ranging from $190 million to $230 million for the protocol.
Although Aave's smart contracts were not breached, the incident still triggered significant panic. The most direct consequence was the withdrawal of over $8 billion in deposits.
This exposed a long-underestimated issue in DeFi. The safety of the protocol itself does not mean the overall system is secure. In a highly interconnected on-chain financial system, risks are no longer simply single-point issues but network problems.
Aave's problems did not stem from internal code but from the quality of external collateral. This indicates that the future of DeFi risk management will enter a new phase, where risk assessment objects are not just individual protocols but the interconnections of the entire ecosystem.
In the short term, this undoubtedly dealt a heavy blow to market confidence. But in the long term, this crisis may have strengthened Aave's strategic value instead.
The reason is that protocols that can survive extreme risks often attain higher barriers. In financial history, truly great institutions typically undergo crises. This applies to banks, exchanges, and on-chain protocols as well.
Aave demonstrated three key capabilities during the crisis: first, the core architecture of the protocol remained functional; second, the governance system continued to operate effectively; and third, the market's fundamental credit had not yet collapsed.
These three points are extremely important because the moat of DeFi is not just code but market consensus. More critically, Aave's fundamentals are not poor.
Stani Kulechov provided a striking figure in his response: Aave's current annualized revenue has reached $134 million. Note that this is income at the protocol level, and it all belongs to Aave DAO. This indicates that Aave is not just "a protocol" but more like a high cash-flow financial enterprise.
From a traditional financial valuation standpoint, an overall valuation of $385 million seems low. Calculating based on annualized income corresponds to a sales multiple of less than three times.
However, for a financial infrastructure still in a high-growth sector with significant network effects, this valuation is hard to call expensive. This also explains why Stani explicitly refuted claims of a "70% discount."
From the founder's perspective, if the protocol's cash flow continues to grow, selling at a steep discount is obviously unreasonable. The market may be underestimating Aave's true value.
3. Behind Aavenomics 3.0: DeFi is entering the value capture era
Compared to the acquisition rumors themselves, another piece of information revealed by Stani may be more noteworthy. He stated that the team is designing Aavenomics 3.0, which will introduce a new automated, non-discretionary token buyback mechanism. This statement hints that the value logic of DeFi is undergoing changes.
For a long time, there has been a core problem in the crypto market: protocols can be profitable, but tokens do not necessarily profit. Many DeFi protocols have real income, but this income has not effectively returned to token holders, leading to a long-term disconnection between "cash flow and token prices."
This is also why the market is increasingly focusing on value capture, as the essence of value capture answers one question: how do the revenues generated by the protocol truly flow to token holders?
Aave's answer is buybacks. If the protocol continues to generate income and uses part of that income for automated AAVE buybacks, its economic model will fundamentally change.
This is somewhat similar to stock buybacks in traditional stock markets, where a company continues to repurchase circulating shares after making a profit, prompting the market to reassess its value anchor.
AAVE may also form a similar mechanism in the future. This will bring three potential impacts: reducing the circulating supply in the market, strengthening token value support, and establishing a pricing logic between revenue and valuation. This is highly significant for the entire DeFi industry.
Stani also emphasized that Aave's target market is not limited to crypto assets but covers the entire financial asset market, including RWA (real-world assets).
This reveals a greater ambition. In the future, on-chain lending collateral may not only include ETH, BTC, and stablecoins but also
government bonds, stocks, fund shares, real estate yield rights, and even corporate bonds.
After all, CeFi giants have realized that the next trillion-dollar market may not be in trading but in on-chain asset management.
Conclusion
Regardless of whether Kraken ultimately completes its strategic investment in Aave, this event has released a clear signal that the integration of CeFi and DeFi is accelerating.
What Kraken wants to buy is superficially Aave's equity and tokens. But at a deeper level, it seeks to secure a core position in the future on-chain financial era. Aave wants to prove it is not just an idealistic experiment in DeFi; it is growing into a new type of financial infrastructure that can truly generate cash flow and support global capital flows.
Therefore, the next round of competition in the crypto industry is likely not about whose coin rises faster but about who can become the infrastructure in the new financial order.
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