Etherfi wants to run its credit card backend on AAVE V4, offering a $175M deposit and 20% revenue cut

Etherfi submitted a TEMP CHECK proposal to the Aave governance forum on July 3 to build a dedicated, Etherfi-managed Aave V4 whitelabel instance on Optimism mainnet. The goal: replace Etherfi Cash’s existing proprietary debt manager with Aave’s battle-tested lending architecture, starting with a $175M initial asset cap and a plan to scale toward $500M by the end of 2026.

What the deal actually looks like

Etherfi would operate a specialized Aave V4 hub exclusively for its credit card backend. In exchange, Aave DAO would receive 20% of all reserve-factor revenue generated by the instance. At full deployment, that revenue share translates to an estimated $5-6 million annually flowing to the Aave DAO.

The proposal also calls for deploying a dedicated GHO GSM on Optimism. This would create direct demand for GHO through real-world card spending.

Etherfi currently reports approximately 70,000 active cardholders with $1 billion in annualized spending flowing through its Visa card product.