How are a Hub and a Spoke different from a V3 “market”?
The biggest difference is who holds the funds. A V3 market holds its own funds. A V4 Spoke does not hold funds itself; it is a set of rules (acceptable collateral, risk parameters, Liquidation method) that draws liquidity from a Hub. The Hub is where assets are kept, and the Spoke decides who can use the money and how.
So the same deposit can support several lending environments with different rules at once, a combination V3 did not offer.
Why did Aave make this change? Was V3 not enough?
Aave does not say V3 was not enough. Its page says V4 changes how the protocol prices risk, handles liquidations, and lets governance update parameters, with unified liquidity as the central thesis. From the architecture, a reasonable guess at the motive is to let new markets, such as ones aimed at a specific asset or institutional need, avoid recruiting depositors from scratch each time. That is an inference; the launch page does not lay out the reasoning item by item.
The same page says Aave has processed over $1 trillion in cumulative loans and holds over 50% of the decentralized lending market, Aave's own figures, which also helps explain why an architecture change came with a review process lasting months.
Is a Spoke's risk really isolated from the other Spokes?
At the level of rules, yes: each Spoke has its own collateral list, risk parameters, and Liquidation rules. At the level of funds, they share one Hub. So what is isolated is the standard of judgment, not the pool of money.
How a Hub handles one Spoke's Bad Debt in an extreme case, and whether caps limit how much a single Spoke can borrow, are not quantified on the launch page and need the official risk isolation and parameter documents. The conservative caps at launch are the known buffer for now, and later changes are decided by DAO Governance.
I am an existing Aave user. What do I need to do?
Nothing immediately. After V4 launched on Ethereum mainnet, existing V3 positions remain in V3, and the official page presents V4 as an additional environment. To use V4, the main access point is Aave Pro, which shows all Hubs and Spokes and presents risk premium, Health Factor, and rate information in a unified account view.
Before putting funds into V4, it is worth confirming three things: which Hub you are supplying to, which collateral and Liquidation rules apply to the Spoke you are borrowing through, and the current supply and borrow caps of that Hub and Spoke. These can be found in Aave Pro and in the activation proposal on the governance forum.
On March 30, 2026, Aave launched V4 on Ethereum mainnet. The core description on its official blog comes down to one sentence: assets are held centrally in a Hub, and individual lending markets connect to the Hub as Spokes, each setting its own collateral, risk parameters, and Liquidation rules. It looks like an internal architecture change, but it changes a basic question: how does a new lending market get its funds?
In V3's model, each lending market or each deployment on a chain was roughly its own pool of funds. To open a new market, for example a high-Leverage market for a particular liquid Staking Token, depositors had to be willing to put money into that new pool before the market had anything to lend. A new market had to go through a cold start, and liquidity was split into many pieces, each of limited depth.
According to Aave, the Liquidity Hub holds assets centrally, while Spokes connect to a Hub, each with its own collateral types, risk parameters, and liquidation rules. Capital supplied by depositors enters the Hub and then becomes available to every Spoke connected to it, and borrowing draws from the shared Hub. Aave's own example is that one pool can serve a conservative institutional market, an ETH liquid staking e-Mode market, and a dedicated Ethena environment at the same time. New markets do not need to find their own depositors and can start from existing liquidity.
Aave lists three initial Hubs. The Core Hub has the most assets and Spokes and is the default liquidity and routing venue. The Prime Hub is aimed at suppliers who want a more controlled collateral posture. The Plus Hub is meant for strategy-heavy Stablecoin activity that scales behind its own caps. All three launched with conservative supply and borrow caps that the Aave DAO will raise after observing live behavior. According to media reports, Spokes from Lido, EtherFi, Kelp, Ethena, and Lombard were live at launch, Chainlink is the exclusive Oracle provider across V4 markets, and the main access point is the new advanced interface, Aave Pro.
The benefit of shared liquidity is direct: new markets start more easily, and capital may be used more efficiently. The cost has to be reasoned out from the structure. Under one Hub, the risk parameters of each Spoke are separate, but the funds are one pool. So if collateral inside one Spoke goes wrong, the damage is bounded by that Spoke's rules, but the liquidity it borrowed came from the shared Hub, and other depositors on that Hub and borrowers in other Spokes still indirectly depend on that money being recovered. This is our inference from the architecture. Aave's public pages emphasize risk isolation, and the details live in the official documents on risk premiums, the new liquidation engine, and per-Spoke parameters; the launch page itself does not give those formulas or specific limits. This site's Kelp-to-Aave Bad Debt case shows how a protocol you never touched can still shrink your deposit, and it is a useful comparison when reading about V4.
Aave says V4 went through about 345 cumulative days of security review involving four audit firms and four independent security researchers, plus a six-week public contest on Sherlock with over 900 verified participants. Audit reports from Trail of Bits, Blackthorn, and ChainSecurity are published in the V4 GitHub repository, and Certora worked on architectural reviews, threat modeling, and continuous Formal Verification. These are Aave's own figures.
If you use Aave, V4 adds a layer to the question of where your funds are: which Hub you supplied to and which Spoke you borrowed through, which may carry different risk settings. The interface shows risk premium, Health Factor, and rate information, but to judge what risk you are taking you still need to understand those two names. The conservative caps at launch also mean supply and borrowing capacity are limited in the near term, and how far they are loosened later is decided by DAO vote.