Why is Aave up today?

Aave is outrunning the broader market, up 6.3% in 24 hours to $147.31 while Bitcoin was flat on the day, though both are riding a strong week (AAVE +14.1%, BTC +10.3%). The clearest coin-specific catalyst is regulatory positioning in DeFi: the Federal Reserve opened two proposals for comment under the GENIUS Act, requiring supervised stablecoin issuers to fully back tokens with safe assets and setting up an application process for banks that want to issue them — a framework that matters directly to lending protocols built around stablecoin liquidity.

Aave is also at the center of a live governance fight over how onchain vaults get classified. Morpho founder Paul Frambot proposed splitting vaults into "noncustodial" and "discretionary" buckets for regulators; Aave founder Stani Kulechov called the split "self-serving," with vault builders arguing a timelock does not remove the manager.

Offsetting that, risk headlines remain heavy: roughly $350 million was drained from wallets labeled as Bitget's in under an hour, New York sued Polymarket over unlicensed gambling, and the 30-year Treasury yield hit 5.44%, its highest since 2004.