Aave’s 2026 Master Plan: Stani Kulechov Targets $1B in RWAs and 1 Million Users

Aave founder Stani Kulechov just laid out a two-year roadmap that's as ambitious as it is specific. The goal? To transform the DeFi stalwart from a lending protocol into a trillion-dollar gateway for real-world assets.

The Billion-Dollar Bridge

Kulechov's vision hinges on a single, staggering number: one billion dollars. That's the target for tokenized real-world assets—think real estate, corporate debt, government bonds—flowing through Aave by 2026. It's a direct shot at the heart of traditional finance, aiming to do for illiquid assets what DeFi did for crypto: make them tradable, composable, and accessible 24/7.

The Million-User Onramp

The other pillar of the plan is scaling to one million active users. This isn't just about vanity metrics. It's about building the liquidity and network effects necessary to support that billion-dollar RWA market. Expect aggressive pushes into user-friendly front-ends, cross-chain expansion, and products that feel less like a financial instrument and more like an app—a necessary evil if you want to onboard anyone who still balances a checkbook.

The protocol is betting that the future isn't just digital money, but digitizing everything else. They're building the plumbing for a world where your mortgage and your meme coins live in the same wallet. Whether traditional finance sees it as an invasion or an invitation remains to be seen—after all, Wall Street has a long history of loving innovation right up until it cuts them out of the fee stream.

Bridging traditional and decentralized finance

Aave V4 is expected to include a hub-and-spoke design, enabling a single LAYER of liquidity on multiple blockchains with localized spokes to fulfill regional requirements. The system would enhance capital efficiency and experience for the end-users.

Meanwhile, Horizon, which attempts to connect decentralized finance and traditional finance, concentrates on the concept of real-world assets’ tokenization. According to Kulechov, the goal is $1 billion worth of real-world asset deposits.

Stani Kulechov also mentioned the Aave app, which is supposed to bring the entire process from serving developers to serving consumers through their smartphones. The mobile application aims to reach 1 million users by simplifying decentralized finance.

The roadmap comes after the closure of a prolonged SEC investigation. For the last four years, Aave Labs has been operating with regulatory watch, which, according to Kulechov, has posed a major pressure on the team and resulted in draining its resources. The team received a letter from the SEC indicating they WOULD not recommend any action against the protocol, and therefore, they can now expand.

From protocol to consumer product

The past decade has seen the development of Aave, starting off as ETHLend in the year 2017, right up to it becoming one of the leading decentralized finance systems. To date, a combined sum of over $3.33 trillion has been deposited through the platform. The master plan is introduced when the protocol has already established itself on several networks, along with the development of its stablecoin, GHO.

Kulechov added that the DeFi industry received unfair regulatory pressure in recent years. “We’re happy to put this in the past as we begin this new era where developers can really build back the future of finance. DeFi will win,” he emphasized. 

Also Read: Aave Founder Confirms End of Four-Year SEC Investigation