Ave shared his 2026 roadmap, targeting protocol scale, RWA progress.
After Ave founder and CEO Stani Kulekov unveiled a “master plan” for its 2026 decentralized protocol, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has announced it has dropped its four-year investigation into the platform.
Kulekov, in a post sent to X on Tuesday, said that although the While 2025 marks a very “successful year” for the platform, Ave still feels he's at “zero compared to what lies ahead.”
In the year Referring to 2026, the CEO outlined a master plan that will focus on refining the DeFi platform and achieving certain usage metrics, such as $1 billion in real-world asset (RWA) deposits.
“As it stands, our strategy going into next year has three main pillars: Aave V4, Horizon and Aave App,” he said.
Aave V4 is a major upgrade to bring significant improvements to the platform's credit and loan pools, user interface and liquidity metrics, among other things.
In the article, Kulekov said V4 will be the “backbone of all finance,” pointing to the customized credit markets that V4's Hub and Spoke model will offer.
Under this model, the hub represents a single unified cross-chain liquidity pool that acts as a central location for all assets on the protocol, while the spokes represent highly customizable markets that feed into the hub's liquidity.
This allows Ave to hold trillions of dollars in assets, making it the choice for any institution, fintech or company to access Ave's deep, secure liquidity.
“In 2026, the Ave of new markets, new assets and new integrations will be unprecedented in DeFi. We will continue to engage with fintechs and work closely with the DAO and our partners on the event TVL throughout the year.”
Looking at the next pillar on the horizon, Ave's decentralized real-world property market, the CEO outlined his desire to become a central player in the RWA space by onboarding “several top financial institutions.”
“Horizon currently sits at $550 million in net deposits. By 2026, we will try to quickly reach $1 billion and above by expanding our work with leading institutional partners such as Circle, Ripple, Franklin Templeton, VanEck and others to bring major global asset classes to Aave,” he said.
The final pillar is the Aave mobile app that launched on the Apple Store in mid-November, which Kulechov describes as a “Trojan horse” to bring DeFi to the mainstream.
According to the CEO, the mobile fintech sector is a “$2+ trillion dollar industry” and Ave has made its complex infrastructure as easy as possible for people to use, as well as beating competitors by offering better savings products.
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“Early next year, we will begin the full release of the Aave app and begin the journey to our first million users. This will directly fuel the growth of a completely new and untapped market for the Aave protocol. Without mass adoption at the production level, Ave cannot reach the trillion dollar mark.”
The SEC ends a four-year investigation
On Tuesday, Kulekov shared a letter dated August 12, 2025, confirming the end of the SEC's four-year investigation.
Kulekov said the platform is “delighted to put this behind us as we enter a new era where developers can truly shape the financial future of the future.”
Alongside the SEC and Master Plan announcement, Kulekov concluded the event on Tuesday by sharing that he had privately purchased AAVE for $9.8 million outside of Aave DAO's planned buyback program.
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