Aave — Who is getting Aave Rewards?

As we all know, Aave is “an open source and non-custodial liquidity protocol for earning interest on deposits and borrowing assets”, but there is no protocol can run successfully without incentive and rewards, as you might be interesting, the question we are exploring in this article is: Who is getting Aave Rewards?

In this article, I am going to do a breakdown of who is getting rewards from lending/borrowing markets as well as from the staked Aave (stkAAVE) Pool. All the data, tool come from Flipside Crypto.

First, let’s do a very quick introduction to Aave: Aave is a protocol, which you can lend/borrow money to get interest or fund. One concrete example, you want to buy a coffee during the lunch break, but you forgot your wallet, then you asked your friend to lend you $3.18 for a coffee and when you get your wallet, you pay back him $3.2. In this example, you borrowed $3.18 from your friend to overcome the embarrassing situation and then you paid him $3.2, $0.02 as interest. Now in the Defi world, Aave protocol is the friend always around to lend/borrow your money and it runs by interests. And here, the interest is the Rewards we are talking about here. More details can be found in the Aave official introduction website: https://docs.aave.com/aavenomics/safety-module.

Lending/borrowing markets

Let’s look at the lending/borrowing markets rewards firstly, to understand and get familiar with that, we need to know one contract, name is Aave: Incentives Controller, contract address is: 0xd784927Ff2f95ba542BfC824c8a8a98F3495f6b5. This smart contract control the incentive distribution across the Aave ecosystem, if we took a quick look at the Etherscan for this contract, then we can find users usually use it to claim rewards.

Go deeper into each transaction, we can see this address (From part) get $0.75 from the Aave rewards program.

So, having this information, now let’s do the data analysis step by step.

Daily rewards and the cumulative rewards amount

Based on this logic, looking at the Daily Aave lending with the cumulative rewards, easily found that the cumulative rewards goes higher and higher (for sure) and it keeps a constant rate, not drop/down by the curve rate. This is good sign for a protocol as the stability will keep locking more and more users.

Take out the cumulative line and look closer at the daily reward, interesting findings is that there is peak time appearing periodly.

Who is getting Rewards?

OK, go back to the question itself, who is getting the Aave Rewards? Take the Top 20 addresses since the rewards launched, here is table:

Looking at the chart with the rewards bar amount, good thing is that the top 20 addresses get almost evenly distributed rewards amount, not much skewed effects.

staked Aave (stkAAVE) Pool

To identify this kind of Aave rewards, we need to firstly get the contract address for stkAAVE: 0x4da27a545c0c5b758a6ba100e3a049001de870f5, then take a look at one transaction:

Similar approach, by filter down the contract address and from/to address, we can get the following chart to show the daily reward.

Daily rewards and the cumulative rewards amount

Unlike the Lending/Borrow markets, this time it has a huge peak effect, the peak time point gathered at May/Sep 2021, when there were new announcement for the incentive liquidity mining program for this staked Aave (stkAAVE) Pool.

Who is getting Rewards?

Followed the same path, we can get the list of the top 20 addresses get rewards.

Compared these 2 charts with the charts in the previous section, the interesting thing coming out. The staked Aave (stkAAVE) Pool has a much larger distributed rewards amount, but more evenly distributed, it is small amount but large quantitive distributed.

Conclusion

Do a quick conclusion here, in the Aave, who is getting rewards? The answer is as many as possible users involved. From the above 2 section analysis we can easily see that what Aave protocol wants to do is not let one party with large amount dominated the whole eco system, but using the rewards/incentive program try best to distributed the rewards evenly to different participants.

All the data, tool come from Flipside Crypto.The link to all the queries is here.