About Stani
Stani Kulechov founded Aave, the largest decentralised lending protocol in the world, and leads Aave Labs, the software company building on top of it. He started while studying law at the University of Helsinki, launching ETHLend in 2017 as one of the first DeFi applications, then rebuilding it as the Aave Protocol - an open, non-custodial money market now governed by the Aave DAO. Aave Labs has since shipped GHO, the protocol’s native stablecoin, Lens, a decentralised social graph, and Horizon, an institutional market where regulated firms borrow stablecoins against tokenised real-world assets alongside names including Circle, Ripple, Franklin Templeton and VanEck. His 2026 roadmap - the V4 hub-and-spoke redesign, Horizon and a consumer Aave App - is a bet that onchain credit markets can carry institutional volume, which is exactly the plumbing question that decides whether autonomous agents can borrow, lend and settle without a human in the loop.
Areas of Expertise
- DeFi
- Digital Assets
- Market Infrastructure
- Institutional Finance
- Payments
