Aave was founded in 2017 by Stani Kulechov and his co-founders as the ETHLend money market, later renamed Aave. The protocol is now maintained by Aave Labs together with the Aave DAO and a wide group of contributors. Kulechov serves as founder and chief executive, while technical leadership including the core protocol engineers runs the open source code base that produces every Aave V3 release.

Aave launched its first lending market on Ethereum in 2017 and released the Aave V2 upgrade in 2020. Aave V3 arrived in 2022 with cross-chain markets and improved isolation, and Aave V4 introduced a hub and spoke liquidity architecture. The GHO stablecoin, Umbrella automated bad debt coverage, institutional products such as Horizon and tokenized equity collateral marks the current expansion phase.

AETHUSDT lives on Ethereum as an ERC-20 contract deployed by the Aave V3 Pool smart contract. When users supply USDT, the pool mints equal amounts of this receipt token, which is what tracks the claim on the underlying deposit. The Pool contract sits behind a proxy owned by the PoolAddressesProvider, with configuration handled by the PoolConfigurator and access control by the ACL Manager, and prices come from Chainlink oracles.

The token has no mining, no burn schedule and no fixed cap because it is a claim on deposited USDT rather than a standalone currency. Its supply simply expands as new USDT is supplied to the pool and contractually shrinks when positions are withdrawn. The holder's balance grows over time from the interest paid by borrowers, with the rate following a two slope utilization curve, while the reserve factor is retained by the protocol.

Aave is steered by the Aave DAO, whose members hold the AAVE governance token and vote on proposals covering risk parameters, new reserve listings, oracle choices and fee changes. Most actions run through the permissionless Pool contract with no administrator able to move user funds, and the Umbrella module now handles bad debt coverage automatically through staked assets instead of manual governance decisions.

Holding AETHUSDT means earning a variable yield on USDT without leaving the Ethereum money market, since the balance appreciates over time. The token can be supplied as collateral to borrow other assets such as ETH or stablecoins, used to mint GHO through the Aave system, redeemed in the Aave Earn vaults for structured strategies, or accepted as collateral in other DeFi strategies that integrate Aave markets.