Aave seeks community backing for V4 launch on Circle’s Arc blockchain

Aave Labs proposed the deployment of its next-generation lending protocol V4 on Arc.

The proposal, which was published on May 29 under “Temp Check” on the Aave governance portal, inquires whether Aave could become a core lending protocol on Arc, considering the network’s plan to launch its mainnet during the summer of 2026.

A temp check is the earliest stage in Aave’s governance process.

Circle’s CEO, Jeremy Allaire, has publicly backed this integration.

What Arc is and why Aave wants to be on it

Arc is Circle’s public layer-1, designed as what the company calls the economic operating system of the internet. It uses USDC for transaction fees and is built specifically for stablecoin liquidity and tokenized real-world assets.

As Cryptopolitan reported in October, Arc launched its public testnet with participation from BlackRock, Visa, and AWS, alongside DeFi protocols including Aave, Curve, and Maple. The testnet positioning signaled Arc as a potential regulation-compliant home for institutional DeFi.

Arc has since processed over 150 million transactions from 1.5 million wallets, per Circle. The network moved out of testnet earlier this year as part of Circle’s 2026 push to expand stablecoin adoption beyond payments into capital formation and settlement.

For Aave, Arc represents access to the institutional capital Circle is courting. Aave’s Horizon platform, which lets institutions borrow stablecoins against tokenized assets like US Treasuries, crossed $580 million in net deposits by December 2025.

The DAO’s 2026 roadmap targets $1 billion through partnerships with Circle, Ripple, Franklin Templeton, and VanEck. Implementing V4 on Arc integrates Aave’s lending infrastructure directly into Circle’s institutional pipeline.

How V4’s architecture differs from V3

Aave V4 replaces the fragmented liquidity pools of earlier versions with a Hub-and-Spoke model. A central Liquidity Hub on each blockchain aggregates assets, while customizable Spoke markets draw from that shared liquidity with their own risk parameters. The design is built to handle institutional-scale volume.

V4 also adopts the ERC-4626 vault standard, eliminating the rebasing behavior of current aTokens. That simplifies accounting for integrators, auditors, and tax software, which Aave views as a substantial step forward in terms of adoption by institutions.

The Arc proposal is one of several V4 deployment efforts running in parallel. Aave filed a proposal to deploy V4 on Ethereum Mainnet in March. A separate temp check to deploy on Avalanche, with up to $15 million in incentives tied to growth targets, went live two days ago.

Babylon Labs has suggested implementing native Bitcoin collateral in V4 by introducing Spoke markets.

The governance fight running underneath the expansion

The V4 rollout has not been smooth. The “Aave Will Win” framework, which proposed routing 100% of Aave Labs product revenue to the DAO treasury and ratifying V4 as the core technical layer, passed its temp check on March 1 with just 52.58% support.

Aave Chan Initiative founder Marc Zeller challenged the result, alleging the proposal passed only because of roughly 233,000 AAVE votes from addresses he described as linked to Aave Labs, including a 111,000 AAVE delegation from founder Stani Kulechov. Zeller argued that excluding those clusters would have flipped the vote to rejection.

In February, BGD Labs, Aave’s main technical collaborator for the past four years, said it would not continue working after April 1 due to centralization issues and a supposedly “unfair” presentation of V3’s history in order to justify V4.

The Arc deployment enters that contested environment. Whether it clears the same governance gauntlet that the broader V4 rollout faced will determine if Aave reaches Circle’s institutional users on the timeline its roadmap targets.

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