Aave price surges amid whale accumulation and V3.1 launch

Decentralized finance protocol Aave is seeing a significant increase in whale activity as the market looks to recover from the recent drop that pushed most altcoins into key support zones earlier this week.

On July 31, Lookonchain shared details showing that whales have been aggressively accumulating Aave (AAVE) over the past two days. According to the data, whales withdrew over 58,848 AAVE worth $6.47 million from exchanges during this period.

In one example, whale address 0x9af4 withdrew 11,185 AAVE worth $1.23 million from Binance. Meanwhile, another address moved 21,619 AAVE worth more than $2.38 million from the exchange and deposited the tokens into Aave.

These withdrawals follow a transfer of 26,044 AAVE previously withdrawn from Binance via whale address 0xd7c5, equivalent to over $2.83 million.

The price of AAVE has surged by more than 7% in the past 24 hours under the buying pressure of these whales. Currently, the DeFi token is trading at around $111, having jumped more than 18% in the past week.

Recently, the AAVE price increased by more than 8% after AAVE founder Marc Zeller announced a fee change proposal that aims to adopt a buyback program for AAVE tokens.

Aave v3.1 is now available

The total value locked in the Aave protocol is currently around $22 billion. According to DeFiLlama, around $19.9 billion is in Aave V3, the V2 chain is still at around $1.9 billion in TVL, and V1 holds around $14.6 million.

Earlier today, Aave Labs announced that Aave V3.1 is now live on all networks with active Aave V3 instances.

The v3.1 release includes enhancements set to improve the overall security of the DeFi protocol. The Aave DAO administration has confirmed the v3.1 enhancements for the network, which also include operational efficiency and availability.

Meanwhile, Aave Labs recently outlined an ambitious roadmap for the project, which, among other developments, included a 2030 vision for Aave V4.