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Flight to safety: How Maker’s Spark and USDC are winning the $10 billion Aave breakup
Funds leaving Aave are splitting across safer lending, simpler ETH exposure and off-chain yield, with stablecoins acting as a temporary refuge.
Apr 22, 2026, 9:46 a.m.
What to know:
- More than $10 billion has left Aave since the $292 million Kelp DAO exploit, as impaired collateral and forced deleveraging drove users to unwind positions and withdraw funds.
- Capital has fragmented across alternatives, with Maker-linked Spark, real-world asset protocols and major liquid staking platforms seeing modest inflows as users favor simpler, tightly risk-managed venues.
- A sizable share of funds has moved into stablecoins such as USDC or been used to repay loans, signaling a broader pullback from complex shared-collateral and cross-chain structures rather than a shift to a single new platform.
Some of that capital has moved into Maker-linked Spark, which has emerged as the clearest relative winner. Its TVL has risen around 10% as users rotate toward infrastructure backed by Sky’s $6.5 Billion stablecoin reserves, favoring tighter risk controls over open-ended lending markets exposed to complex collateral.
Elsewhere, large liquid staking providers like Lido have held relatively steady. That stability suggests users are not abandoning ETH exposure, but stripping out layers of risk tied to restaking, rehypothecation and cross-chain bridges.
A third pocket of inflows is showing up in real-world asset protocols such as Centrifuge and Spiko, which both offer exposure to tokenized assets like T-bills and bonds.
