Leading the Top 40 Cryptocurrencies, AAVE Soars 19% in a Single Day — What’s Fueling the Surge?

AAVE Rockets 19% Following Aptos Launch, Powell’s Dovish Comments, and WLFI Rumors

AAVE surged nearly 19% to $355.29 on August 24, leading the top 40 cryptocurrencies by daily percentage gains. The rally comes amid Aave’s expansion onto the Aptos blockchain, dovish remarks from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and speculation about Aave’s involvement with the WLFI token.

Understanding Aave and Its Significance

Aave is a leading decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that allows users to lend and borrow crypto assets without intermediaries. Utilizing smart contracts, borrowers must provide collateral exceeding the value of their loans.

The AAVE token supports this ecosystem by enabling staking for security and rewards, serving as collateral, and granting governance rights to holders. This makes AAVE integral to protocol governance and fee distribution.

Expansion to Aptos Blockchain

On August 21, Aave Labs announced the launch of Aave V3 on Aptos, marking the protocol’s first deployment beyond Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible chains. The team redeveloped the code in the Move language, revamped the user interface, and adapted the platform for Aptos’s virtual machine.

The launch included thorough audits, a capture-the-flag competition on mainnet, and a $500,000 bug bounty program. The initial market supports tokens such as APT, sUSDe, USDT, and USDC, with borrowing and supply caps set to increase gradually. Risk evaluations were conducted by Chaos Labs and Llama Risk, while Chainlink supplies real-time price data.

CEO Stani Kulechov called the Aptos launch “an incredible milestone,” highlighting Aave’s move beyond five years of exclusivity on EVM-based networks.

Powell’s Dovish Remarks Drive Market Optimism

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium on August 22 signaled a shift toward potential interest rate cuts, possibly starting in September. Powell emphasized a changing balance of risks between inflation and employment.

Markets responded positively, with CME FedWatch showing an 83% chance of a September rate cut, up from 75% earlier in the week. Both equities and cryptocurrencies, including AAVE, rallied strongly after his comments.

WLFI Token Exposure Speculation

Adding to the momentum are rumors that Aave holds exposure to WLFI, the governance token of World Liberty Financial — a DeFi project linked to Donald Trump’s family.

In October 2024, World Liberty Financial proposed launching its own Aave V3 instance on Ethereum’s mainnet. The proposal suggested:

• AaveDAO would receive 20% of protocol fees generated by the WLFI Aave V3 instance.
• AaveDAO would also receive approximately 7% of WLFI’s total token supply for governance participation, liquidity mining, and promoting decentralization.

An analyst at Delphi Digital estimated that, with WLFI’s token trading scheduled to start September 1 at an implied $27.3 billion valuation, Aave’s stake could be worth roughly $1.9 billion—more than a third of AAVE’s current fully diluted valuation of about $5 billion. This potential stake might be partly driving the price rally.

However, the WLFI team publicly denied the claim that Aave will receive 7% of WLFI’s total token supply, calling the report “false and fake news.”

Technical Analysis Overview

CoinDesk Research data shows that AAVE climbed 18.65% between August 22 (12:00 UTC) and August 23 (11:00 UTC), rising from $297.75 to $353.22 amid growing investor confidence.

The token traded within a $62.11 range during this period, between $294.50 and $356.60. The largest price spike occurred at 14:00 UTC on August 22, with a volume surge to 340,907 units—more than triple the daily average of 102,554.

Sustained buying pressure was observed in the final hour analyzed (10:49–11:48 UTC on August 23), with prices advancing from $349.61 to $353.79. Trading volumes exceeded 3,000 units at key price points, significantly higher than the average of 1,647 units, suggesting methodical institutional accumulation.

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