IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bis/biswps/1183.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Why DeFi lending? Evidence from Aave V2

Author

Listed:
  • Giulio Cornelli
  • Leonardo Gambacorta
  • Rodney Garratt
  • Alessio Reghezza

Abstract

Decentralised finance (DeFi) lending protocols have experienced significant growth recently, yet the motivations driving investors remain largely unexplored. We use granular, transaction-level data from Aave, a leading player in the DeFi lending market, to study these motivations. Our theoretical and empirical findings reveal that the search for yield predominantly drives liquidity provision in DeFi lending pools, whereas borrowing activity is mainly influenced by speculative and, to some extent, governance motives. Both retail- and large investors seek potential high returns through market movements and price speculation, however the latter engage in DeFi borrowing relatively more than the former also to influence protocol decisions and accrue more significant governance rights.

Suggested Citation

  • Giulio Cornelli & Leonardo Gambacorta & Rodney Garratt & Alessio Reghezza, 2024. "Why DeFi lending? Evidence from Aave V2," BIS Working Papers 1183, Bank for International Settlements.
    • Handle: RePEc:bis:biswps:1183
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bis.org/publ/work1183.pdf
    File Function: Full PDF document
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.bis.org/publ/work1183.htm
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    cryptocurrency; DeFi; decentralized finance; lending;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G18 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors
    • O39 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Other

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bis:biswps:1183. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Martin Fessler (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bisssch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.