Aave is a decentralized lending platform built on Ethereum. The most important step the project took, was transforming from a market place for loans to pool lending. In pool lending, lenders put their tokens together in a pool, out of which borrowers take their loans. The interest rate is determined by supply and demand. The higher the %age of a pool is already loaned out, the higher the interest rate. In a market place, lender and borrows set their interest rate and waited for someone to take them up on their offer. This process was rather strenuous and inefficient.
Aave for lenders In order to offer a loan on Aave, all you have to do is send your tokens that you wish to lend to a smart contract. Aave then generates a token called a+”Token-ticker”. For example, for the US-Dollar stablecoin DAI one would obtain aDAI. aDai can be exchanged for DAI at any given moment provided the pool isn’t overloaded. If for example the pool has 100 DAIs, 99 out of which are lended, and somebody wished to exchange their 5 aDAI for 5 DAI, he would first have to wait for the borrowers to pay them back. The aDAI in our case increases in value compared to DAI, because the borrowers pay back interest to the pools. In that sense, aDAI can be seen as a transferable, interest-bearing DAI token. The aDAI contract updates the holder’s credit by the minute depending on the interest rate. To make it simpler, whoever holds aDAI in his wallet, will see its value increase periodically.