Aave (AAVE)

Usage vs. price: Aave's newest version, V4, just hit an all-time high in deposits (over $400M), and separate coverage this week describes Aave as the dominant DeFi venue for tokenized gold. Price hasn't moved much on either — AAVE is roughly flat both today and over the full 90-day window. For an established protocol like this, that's a different pattern than the "hype without fundamentals" seen elsewhere in this series: here the fundamentals look solid and the price is simply steady, not lagging a speculative move.