AAVE Leads Top 40 Cryptocurrencies With 19% Surge in One Day — Here’s What Could Be Driving It
The AAVE price jumped 19% to $355.29 as following Aave going live on Aptos, Jerome Powell’s dovish comments on Friday and a rumor about Aave’s alleged exposure to the WLFI token.
Updated Aug 23, 2025, 6:55 p.m. Published Aug 23, 2025, 2:02 p.m.
AAVE surged nearly 19% to $355 over the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk Data, leading the top 40 cryptocurrencies by percentage daily gain as investors responded to its recent Aptos expansion and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s dovish remarks.
What Aave is and why it matters
Aave is a decentralized finance protocol that lets users lend and borrow cryptocurrencies without intermediaries. Loans are managed by smart contracts, with borrowers required to post collateral valued above their loans.
The AAVE token underpins this system. It can be staked to support security and earn rewards, used as collateral for borrowing and grant holders governance rights. In return, tokenholders gain voting power and fee benefits, making AAVE central to protocol operations.
Aptos expansion
On Aug. 21, Aave Labs announced that Aave V3 had gone live on Aptos, its first deployment on a non-EVM blockchain. Developers rewrote the codebase in the Move language, rebuilt the user interface and adapted the protocol for the Aptos virtual machine.
The launch was supported by audits, a mainnet capture-the-flag competition, and a $500,000 bug bounty. The first market supports assets including APT, sUSDe, USDT and USDC, with supply and borrow caps to be raised gradually. Chaos Labs and Llama Risk conducted risk assessments, and Chainlink provided price feeds.
Aave Labs founder and CEO Stani Kulechov called the launch “an incredible milestone,” highlighting the shift beyond EVM chains after five years of exclusivity.
Jerome Powell’s Dovish Jackson Hole speech
Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s speech on Friday morning at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium added momentum. Powell said the balance of risks between inflation and employment had shifted, signaling that interest rate cuts could begin in September.
Markets viewed his remarks as dovish, with CME FedWatch data showing expectations for a quarter-point cut in September rising to 83% from 75% earlier in the week. U.S. equities and crypto have rallied broadly since Powell’s speech, with AAVE among the biggest movers.
WLFI exposure rumors
Another factor one analyst claims may not be fully priced in is Aave’s alleged exposure to WLFI, the governance token of World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the DeFi project associated with Donald Trump’s family.
In October 2024, the startup proposed launching its own Aave V3 instance on Ethereum mainnet.
The proposal stated:
“AaveDAO will receive:
- 20% of the protocol fees generated by the WLF Aave v3 instance
- Approximately 7% of the total supply of $WLFI tokens for:
- Participation in WLF Governance procedures
- Liquidity mining
- Promoting decentralization of the WLF platform”
It also stated:
“This proposal is subject to both AaveDAO governance approval and World Liberty Financial community approval.”
An X user claiming to be an analyst at Delphi Digital noted on Saturday that with WLFI’s token set to begin trading Sept. 1 at an implied $27.3 billion valuation, Aave’s allocation could be worth around $1.9 billion — more than a third of its current $5 billion fully diluted valuation. He argued that this alleged exposure may be contributing to AAVE’s rally, even if investors are only now revisiting its significance.
According to a post on X by WU Blockchain published at 4:16 p.m. UTC on Saturday, the WLFI team is saying that the claim that “Aave will receive 7% of the total WLFI token supply” is false.
The post stated:
“The WLFI team told WuBlockchain that the claim that ‘Aave will receive 7% of the total WLFI token supply’ is false and fake news. Previously, a community member claimed that, according to a previously released proposal, AaveDAO would receive 20% of the protocol fees generated by the WLFI Aave v3 instance and approximately 7% of the total WLFI token supply.”
Technical analysis highlights
- According to CoinDesk Research’s technical analysis data model, AAVE posted significant gains during the 24-hour trading period from Aug. 22 at 12:00 UTC to Aug. 23 at 11:00 UTC, climbing from $297.75 to $353.22 — an 18.65% increase that reflects growing confidence in the platform’s expansion strategy.
- The digital asset traded within a $62.11 range, fluctuating between $294.50 and $356.60, with the most pronounced price movement occurring at 14:00 UTC on Aug. 22 when trading volume reached 340,907 units, significantly exceeding the daily average of 102,554 units.
- Sustained buying pressure was observed during the final hour of the analysis period from 10:49 UTC to 11:48 UTC on Aug. 23, with AAVE advancing from $349.61 to $353.79.
- Trading volumes consistently exceeded 3,000 units during key price levels at $352.55, $353.98, and $355.52, compared to the session average of 1,647 units, indicating what market participants describe as methodical institutional positioning.
Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.
Updated at 6:19 p.m. UTC on Aug. 23 to include more information about Aave’s alleged exposure to the WLFI token, especially the X post by WU Blockchain published at 4:16 p.m. UTC on Aug. 23, which claimed that the rumor about Aave DAO receiving 7% of the total supply of the WLFI is false.
Siamak Masnavi
Siamak Masnavi is a researcher focused on blockchain technology, cryptocurrency regulation and macroeconomic forces shaping digital assets — including interest rate policy, capital flows and adoption trends. He holds an MSc and PhD in computer science from the University of London and began his career in software development, with nearly four years in the banking sector in London and Zurich. Since April 2018, he has been writing about the crypto industry. His focus shifted primarily to research in November 2024, though he continues to contribute regularly to industry reporting.
CD Analytics
CoinDesk Analytics is CoinDesk’s AI-powered tool that, with the help of human reporters, generates market data analysis, price movement reports, and financial content focused on cryptocurrency and blockchain markets.
All content produced by CoinDesk Analytics is undergoes human editing by CoinDesk’s editorial team before publication. The tool synthesizes market data and information from CoinDesk Data and other sources to create timely market reports, with all external sources clearly attributed within each article.
CoinDesk Analytics operates under CoinDesk’s AI content guidelines, which prioritize accuracy, transparency, and editorial oversight. Learn more about CoinDesk’s approach to AI-generated content in our AI policy.
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