The Aave-chan Initiative (ACI) has reviewed the decision to onboard long-tail assets in Aave V3, and has determined that it is not economically viable to continue onboarding some of these assets on the protocol.
In the past, the Chainlink and Aave Companies have subsidized the price feeds for these assets, but these subsidies are now expected to end in 2023 with increased chatter of whitelist module chainlink activation, following the chainlink staking process. As a result, the ACI is in favor of not onboarding long tail assets in V3 and progressively offboarding them from V1 and V2 in order to cut losses on these assets.
This need to maintain only economically viable assets in V3 is more important in ethereum Mainnet than on L2s because the transaction fees of the L1 are much higher, and thus the cost of maintaining price-feeds on long tails assets.
the Aave protocol can afford to be more lenient on onboarding assets on L2s but the DAO need to prepare to support these costs in 2023 and can’t assume price feeds are “free” anymore (they never were, some third-parties were just picking the bill so far).
By implementing this policy and starting with a concentrated roster of assets, the Aave DAO will be in a stronger position to negotiate the re-onboarding of assets in the future, and will have the option to subsidize feeds for strategic assets or ask third-party teams to support the cost of price feeds for long tail assets that wish to be onboarded on Aave.
In terms of risk, a cleaned list of assets will decrease the workload of risk teams and potentially help mitigate risk for the protocol.
To this end, the ACI intends to publish a new ARC (Aave Improvement Proposal) to roll back the previous snapshot decision and offboard (more precisely not onboard) the following assets from V3:
| Asset | Initial list | Updated list | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| USDC | YES | YES | Strategic asset to keep in V3 (SA) |
| WETH | YES | YES | SA |
| WSTETH | YES | YES | SA |
| WBTC | YES | YES | SA |
| USDT | YES | YES | SA |
| DAI | YES | YES | SA |
| LINK | YES | YES | SA |
| CRV | YES | YES | SA |
| AAVE | YES | YES | SA |
| MKR | YES | YES | SA |
| FRAX | YES | YES | SA |
| LUSD | YES | YES | SA |
| TUSD | YES | NO | Non-economically viable asset to move over to V3 (NEV) |
| BUSD | YES | NO | NEV |
| YFI | YES | NO | NEV |
| UNI | YES | NO | NEV |
| ZRX | YES | NO | NEV |
| MANA | YES | NO | NEV |
| 1INCH | YES | NO | NEV |
| DPI | YES | NO | NEV |
| SNX | YES | NO | NEV |
| CVX | YES | NO | NEV |
| BAT | YES | NO | NEV |
| ENS | YES | NO | NEV |
update: being aware of @ChaosLabs proposal, we think it’s not relevant to propose a third option, The ACI will prepare an ARC to allows community to decide between Gauntlet & Chaos Lab phase I plans for V3 L1 launch.