Increasing Aave partnerships and integrations?

Other
1

(not governance related)

:exploding_head::exploding_head: on this morning’s announcement that Aave secured an EMI license. (link) Today is big day for all Aavengers.

My first thought when I read about the EMI license was this adds legitimacy to Aave that no other DeFi project has. I think this gives Aave an opportunity to have more mainstream integrations to offer yield generating opportunities, along the lines of what Paxos recently announced with Revolut and PayPal.

Before approaching these very mainstream/traditioinal partnerships like Revolut and PayPal, I believe that Aave still has a ton of room to grow with more crypto-focused partnerships. I lay out my thoughts below with context, suggestions, and some questions of how the community can help. Talking to other Aavengers, many of us are operators in crypto and well-connected and would like to be able to help however we can to grow the Aave ecosystem.

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One thing I’ve been impressed/surprised about while watching the growth of Compound has been how many apps Compound is powering on the backend.

For example:

  • Dharma runs its interest generation via Compound

  • Donut runs its interest generation via Compound

  • Multis.co “business banking” runs its interest generation via Compound

  • Linen App runs its interest generation via Compound

  • Zerion.io “save” tab only offers Compound

I’ve also seen CeFi apps like Celsius use a similar go-to-market approach

etc., etc.,

In terms of making borrowing/lending available to institutional clients (i.e., people who require custody to use/hold assets) Compound is over-represented with mainstream providers as compared to Aave.

  • Coinbase Custody is considering support for LEND, but doesn’t support it yet
  • Anchorage supports COMP, but not LEND
  • Bitgo appears to support cTokens, but not aTokens
  • Curv currently partners with Compound to offer yield to clients
  • Fireblocks currently with Compound to offer clients an “Institutional Crypto Savings Account”

Are there any apps like this (i.e., apps with smooth UI that abstract away the crypto aspects) currently running solely on Aave? For example, I saw Enjin and walked through that experience, but that is very much a crypto wallet (not user friendly).

How can the community help? Some ideas:

  • Improve the developer docs / ease of integration for third parties.

  • Hire more full-time BD people who are experienced working with crypto companies (I’m open to helping😁)

  • If necessary, perhaps we could fund a grant project or incentivize projects such as Dharma or Donut to switch over to Aave?

Anecdotally, even just yesterday, I was talking to a medium-sized southeast Asian crypto exchange (that offers local fiat rails) and asked them what they thought about DeFi. They were preparing to integrate with Compound so their users could earn yield that way. I naturally suggested they check out Aave, but the guy I spoke to had never heard of Aave (truly, few understand this).

Thank you Stani and the rest of the Aave team. The growth of the protocol and market cap without many of the above things is VERY impressive and I do not at all want to denigrate that. I only want to help Aave reach its next phase of growth :heart:.

Let us know how we can help.

10 Likes
2

I’ve got some exciting thoughts around how we can pool together BD efforts. More to come soon. Thank you!

3

Would definitely love to see more integrations and partnerships, especially in Zerion!

I think there’s a lot the community can do in this field as well, beyond an official Aave BD team member. The community has a large voice, especially when it reaches it to some of these DApps/projects for an Aave integration - so I’d love to see more community members voicing their support to get Aave integrated personally.

5

Avalanche could be a useful channel/partner – might be of benefit to explore getting in on the ground floor of a new innovative (and potentially disruptive) network that’s keen to gain traction.

6

Pardon my ignorance, but why is Compound so much more prominent then Aave? Is there a specific part of the protocol that makes it easier or more appealing to integrate?

Or is it more like a simple coincidence? I’d love to see Aave grow even further!

7

I believe it’s at least 3 things:

  1. Backing from well-regarded VC’s (Polychain, a16z, Coinbase Ventures) give it added legitimacy
  2. They might have better developer docs than Aave which makes it easier to integrate with
  1. They might have more people on their BD team that are doing outreach to e.g,. wallets and custodians to get them to integrate
1 Like
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This is Claude from HUSD team. We noticed that there is already a proposal in AAVE governance discussion, hope we can talk more there.

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Interesting post, specially when we know that lot of new incomers will use services aggregating applications.

Do you know if changes has been seen in this topic @ryan ?