You pull up a long chart for a token you are thinking about trading, and one tall spike from years ago dominates the screen. It is tempting to read that spike as a price the market owes you again, or to read every later dip as a bargain, when both are simply dated points in a record.
Price history turns that chart into a dated record of where a market traded, where each cycle peaked, how far it fell, and how long the recovery took. The AAVE token gives its holders a vote on changes to the Aave lending protocol (source: Wikipedia, Aave). Its daily price record starts on October 7, 2020 and runs through September 24, 2026, long enough to hold one boom, one deep bear market, and a partial recovery (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history).
What is AAVE's price history?
AAVE's price history is usually read as a yearly open, high, low, and close (OHLC) for the token since the LEND migration in October 2020. Data providers build their figures from different sets of exchanges, so two charts of the same token can show slightly different highs on the same day.
AAVE's all-time high came on May 18, 2021, at $666.86 on CoinMarketCap (source: CoinMarketCap, Aave). On CoinGecko the all-time high stands at $661.69, roughly five dollars below the CoinMarketCap figure (source: CoinGecko, Aave). The gap comes from which exchanges each provider counts and how it weights them, so treat the peak as a range of a few dollars on one specific date and identify the provider whenever you quote the number.
A yearly OHLC record compresses twelve months of trading into four prices: the opening price on the first day, the closing price on the last day, and the highest and lowest prices reached at any point in between. The yearly return is therefore the percentage change from the year's first open to its last close. Because cryptocurrency markets operate continuously, those extremes include volatile moves made over weekends and overnight, when a conventional stock exchange would be closed.
AAVE's yearly OHLC figures on the Cryptocurrency History daily series run from the first trading record on October 7, 2020 to September 24, 2026, quoted in USDT (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history).
| Year | Open | Close | High | Low |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 (from October 7) | 42.55 | 88.48 | 96.33 | 25.15 |
| 2021 | 88.35 | 253.90 | 668.00 | 81.29 |
| 2022 | 253.90 | 52.00 | 286.40 | 45.60 |
| 2023 | 52.00 | 108.69 | 129.88 | 47.30 |
| 2024 | 108.68 | 308.82 | 399.85 | 70.00 |
| 2025 | 308.82 | 146.02 | 385.99 | 79.51 |
| 2026 (to September 24) | 146.02 | 146.93 | 180.37 | 57.83 |
Intraday prices and closing prices answer different questions, because an intraday high is the most anyone paid for a moment while a daily close is where the market settled at the end of the day. That is why a drawdown measured from closes usually comes out a little smaller than one measured from intraday extremes. Knowing which kind of price a chart uses tells you how far apart two quoted figures can be and still describe the same market.
The LEND to AAVE migration and the first weeks of trading
AAVE began trading after LEND holders started swapping their tokens at 100 LEND for 1 AAVE in October 2020, a migration that cut the supply from 1.3 billion LEND to 16 million AAVE (source: Aave, Aavenomics). Any LEND price from before the swap sits on a different unit scale.
Of the new AAVE, 13 million tokens were set aside for LEND holders to redeem. The other 3 million went to an Ecosystem Reserve that pays for protocol incentives (source: Aave, Aavenomics). The migration and the start of the Safety Module, a staking pool designed as an extra line of defense for the protocol that pays AAVE holders rewards for staking, came together in one governance proposal, AIP-1 (source: Aave, AIP-1).
After the migration opened on October 2, 2020 at 10:00 PM UTC, more than a third of the LEND supply moved into AAVE within four days. In that first week AAVE traded at a 1-2% premium to the matching amount of LEND, evidence that buyers were willing to pay extra for tokens they could stake and earn with (source: The Defiant, AAVE Trades at Premium to LEND Amid Token Migration).
The first weeks of trading were extremely volatile in both directions: AAVE fell 30.20% in October 2020, including a 47.90% drawdown between October 14 and November 4. It then rose 155.57% in November, ending the partial year at about twice its first recorded price (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history).
The conversion ratio matters whenever you interpret an early chart, because LEND reached about $0.90 at its 2020 high (source: The Defiant, AAVE Trades at Premium to LEND Amid Token Migration). Multiplying by 100 puts that price at $90 in AAVE terms, close to where AAVE closed its first partial year. Any historical LEND level needs the same conversion before it can appear on an AAVE price axis.
The underlying protocol is considerably older than the token. Aave started as ETHLend in November 2017 and took the Aave name in September 2018 (source: CoinGecko, Aave). Its liquidity pool model followed in January 2020 (source: Wikipedia, Aave). That pool model is still how Aave works today, with suppliers depositing assets into a shared pool that borrowers draw from. The AAVE chart therefore begins about nine months after the lending design it governs went live.
The DeFi bull market and AAVE's all-time high
AAVE gained 187.38% from its first open to its last close in 2021, its strongest year, with the cycle peak on May 18, 2021 (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history). Most of that gain accumulated in the first four months, before the May high ended the first cycle and set the all-time high every later chart is measured against.
January 2021 alone added 239.11%, and every month from November 2020 through April 2021 closed higher, which means the climb into May built over six straight up months. On the daily series the 2021 high is $668.00 on May 18, 2021 (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history). That daily high is $1.14 above the CoinMarketCap all-time high of $666.86 (source: CoinMarketCap, Aave), and $6.31 above the CoinGecko all-time high of $661.69 (source: CoinGecko, Aave).
Even inside that run, AAVE suffered a 41.70% drawdown between February 12 and March 24, 2021, a loss the token recovered within the same cycle (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history). Reading the February drop as the end of the bull market would have meant selling before the peak. A token this volatile can lose two fifths of its value in the middle of an uptrend, so the size of a pullback tells you little on its own about whether the trend has ended.
The peak gave way quickly, with May 2021 closing down 14.00% despite the new high and June falling another 34.34%, the steepest monthly drop of the year (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history). A new high in the headlines and a falling monthly close can arrive together, which is why the date of a peak matters more than the excitement around it.
The dates show when AAVE moved, and the reasons sit in a different set of evidence. Supply rules, staking, protocol news, and the direction of bitcoin and ether are the drivers behind AAVE's price. Compare each one against the monthly returns for 2020 and 2021 to see which ones actually coincided with a significant move.
The bear market and AAVE's deepest drawdown
A drawdown is the fall from a peak to the trough that follows it, quoted as a percentage (source: Investopedia, Understanding Drawdowns). AAVE's deepest drawdown on closing prices ran 92.10% from the May 18, 2021 peak to June 18, 2022, a decline still unrecovered on September 24, 2026 (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history).
AAVE lost 79.52% from its first open to its last close in 2022, sliding from a high of $286.40 to a low of $45.60. After June 2022 fell 49.51%, the worst month of the year, July bounced 71.23% in a bear market rally that left the direction of the year unchanged (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history).
You can verify that yearly return yourself with the yearly return formula by subtracting the opening price from the closing price, so $52.00 minus $253.90 gives minus $201.90. Then divide by the opening price: minus 201.90 divided by 253.90 is minus 0.7952, the 79.52% loss in the record. The same arithmetic on the year's low shows how much deeper the trough was. $253.90 minus $45.60 is $208.30, and 208.30 divided by 253.90 is 0.8204, so at the low the year was down about 82 cents on every dollar of its opening price.
Recovering a drawdown takes a larger percentage gain than the fall itself (source: Investopedia, Understanding Drawdowns). The rebound starts from a smaller base, so from the $52.00 close AAVE needed to rise about 4.9 times just to get back to $253.90, and far more than that to reach the 2021 peak.
The following year traded in a broad consolidation range. AAVE still gained 109.02% from its first open to its last close in 2023, rebuilding from the bear market low without setting a new peak (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history).
AAVE's recovery and the latest pullback
AAVE's biggest run on the record ran from the June 18, 2022 trough to December 23, 2024, a 673.20% gain on closing prices that the following months partly gave back. On September 24, 2026 the token closed at $146.93, which is 78.00% below the all-time high on that series (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history).
AAVE gained 184.16% in 2024 despite a 34.99% fall in April, in the middle of the uptrend. November and December added 47.56% and 45.75% to finish the year (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history).
The following calendar year reversed most of that accumulated gain. AAVE lost 52.72% in 2025, with February alone down 42.21% after the December rally (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history).
Leverage is visible in several of the most violent individual days on the record. On October 10, 2025, open interest in one major exchange's USDT-margined AAVE perpetual fell 28.39% while the price dropped 18.13%, one of the largest deleveraging events on the record (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history). Open interest counts the futures contracts that remain open, so a simultaneous collapse in open interest and price indicates that leveraged long positions were closing, many of them through forced liquidation.
Through September 24, 2026, AAVE fell as low as $57.83 before climbing back to roughly where the year began. Five losing months from January to May, including a 12.27% fall in March, came before a 32.43% gain in August (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history).
That March fall came in the month Aave V4 went live on Ethereum, on March 30, 2026, the latest step in Aave's version history (source: Aave Labs, Aave V4 is Live on Ethereum). A launch date on a chart says nothing on its own about the candles around it, so test any story that links the two against the drivers before you trade on it.
Once you know where the current price sits against those reference points, your likely next step is trading the token itself, and BloFin offers AAVE/USDT Spot for buying and selling the coin and the AAVEUSDT Perpetual for a USDT-margined contract that tracks its price.
Before you place an order on either market, check the maker and taker rates for your tier on the BloFin fee schedule, because fees move the break-even price of any trade you size against these levels.
How to use AAVE price history before you trade
Price history tells you where AAVE has already traded, how deep its drawdowns ran, and how long its recoveries took, which makes it a practical tool for estimating risk. It carries no target price and no buy signal, so use it to set expectations before you choose an entry, a stop loss, and a position size.
Run through these checks whenever a chart or a post uses AAVE's past to argue for a trade:
- Quote the provider. Put CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, or Cryptocurrency History next to any figure you repeat, so the next reader can check it.
- Name the measure. Confirm whether a figure is an intraday high, a daily close, or a yearly close before you compare it with another one.
- Check the date. A price from a migration week, a cycle peak, or a bear market trough describes that moment and the conditions around it.
- Size for the volatility you have seen. A token that has lost two fifths of its value inside an uptrend will hit a tight stop loss on ordinary swings, so a wider stop needs a smaller position.
- Separate history from drivers. Check whether a cause, such as a governance vote or a market-wide sell-off, lines up with the move before you treat a date as a reason.
Here is how those checks turn into a trade plan, using a hypothetical entry of $150 and a decision to risk $30. A stop loss 20% below entry, at $120, is wide by stock market standards and still sits within a single bad month for AAVE, so the stop sets the distance and the position size sets the risk. Dividing the $30 you accept to lose by the $30 distance per token gives a position of one AAVE, or $150 of exposure. A first target at the 2026 high of $180.37 offers about $30.37 per token, roughly one dollar of reward for each dollar of risk, and you exit at whichever level trades first.
Once your plan survives those checks, buy AAVE with a limit order at your planned entry, so the fill matches the risk you sized.
Looking to trade AAVE tokens on BloFin? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, then open the AAVE/USDT Spot trading page or the AAVEUSDT Perpetual page.
Frequently asked questions
What was AAVE's lowest price?
AAVE's lowest daily price is $25.15 on October 9, 2020 on the Cryptocurrency History daily series, one week after the LEND migration opened (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history). The all-time low on CoinGecko is slightly higher at $26.02 (source: CoinGecko, Aave). On CoinMarketCap the all-time low carries no dollar figure and is dated October 2, 2020 (source: CoinMarketCap, Aave). That low belongs to the listing weeks, before the market had a full year of trading behind it, which makes it a weak guide to later cycles. For a recent floor, use the yearly lows of 2025 and 2026.
What were AAVE's best and worst days?
AAVE's best day on record was a 97.77% gain on October 9, 2020, and its worst was a 34.06% loss on May 19, 2021, the day after the all-time high. Of 2,179 days on record through September 24, 2026, 1,074 closed higher, and the standard deviation of daily returns is 6.09% (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history). Standard deviation measures how widely individual daily returns disperse around their average, so a 6% move in a single session is entirely common for this token. Keep that in mind when you set a stop loss, because a stop placed one typical daily move from your entry will be triggered often.
How has AAVE performed over the past year?
AAVE was down 47.19% over the year to September 24, 2026, up 136.11% over three years, and up 0.62% for 2026 to that date. The 90-day return was 54.35% and the 30-day return was 16.06% (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history), so the short-term trend had turned up while the one-year figure still carried the 2025 decline. Rolling returns change every day, so always quote the end date alongside any performance figure. Compare like with like too, because a three-year return measured from a bear market low usually looks stronger than one measured from a peak.
What is AAVE's market cap?
AAVE's market capitalization was about $2.551 billion on October 1, 2026, with 15.434 million tokens in circulation and a price near $165.26 (source: CoinGecko, Aave). Market cap is the price multiplied by the circulating supply, and here 15.434 million tokens at $165.26 come to about $2.55 billion. Fully diluted valuation, the price multiplied by the maximum supply, was $2.645 billion, so the market cap was 0.96 of it. That ratio means nearly every token that can exist already trades, which leaves little room for new supply to dilute holders later.
What funding rate do AAVE perpetual futures pay?
The average annualized funding rate on the USDT-margined AAVE perpetual of one major exchange was +14.35% over its full funding record, and funding was negative on 13.70% of observed days (source: Cryptocurrency History, Aave price history). Funding is a periodic payment between long and short holders that keeps a perpetual contract's price close to the spot price, and when it is positive, longs pay shorts. A positive average means longs paid more often than not, which adds a cost to any long you keep open for weeks. Funding differs by venue, so check the rate on the contract you trade before you hold a perpetual long beyond a few days.
Why can CoinGecko's AAVE price differ from an exchange chart?
CoinGecko's displayed market price aggregates multiple trading pairs instead of representing one exchange's order book. It filters anomalous prices and calculates a volume-weighted average from the remaining pairs, so a larger-volume pair contributes more to the result (source: CoinGecko, Methodology). When comparing that figure with an exchange chart, record the venue, quote currency and observation time. An aggregate price and a price from one trading pair describe different records, even when both carry the AAVE ticker.
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. Primary sources include Cryptocurrency History's AAVE price history, CoinGecko's and CoinMarketCap's Aave pages, the Aavenomics README, AIP-1, The Defiant's migration report, the Aave Labs V4 launch post, Investopedia's drawdown entry, and Wikipedia's Aave entry. All facts independently verified against cited documentation current as of October 2026.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not financial, investment, trading, or legal advice. Cryptocurrency can lose value. Borrowing on Aave can lead to liquidation if the health factor drops below 1. Spot AAVE/USDT buys the token. An AAVEUSDT Perpetual is a contract on the price. Do your own research. Consider your circumstances before using any protocol or trading any asset.