Aave is starting to look much bigger than a DeFi money market. I think its recent governance proposal is underrated. It's Custodied Collateral Lending for @aave V4. The idea is simple: Institutions often hold BTC and other assets with regulated custodians and cannot simply move those assets into DeFi. Aave V4 wants to let them borrow onchain without moving the collateral out of custody. The proposed flow: 1. Institution keeps BTC with Anchorage 2. Chainlink CustodySync verifies and synchronizes the custodied balance 3. A non-transferable Custodied Collateral Token (CoCT) tracks that balance onchain 4. CoCT is posted inside a dedicated Aave V4 Isolated Spoke 5. Stablecoin liquidity comes from an isolated Hub 6. The institution receives stablecoins while the BTC remains with the custodian Even liquidation is different. Instead of sending the custodied BTC to an onchain liquidator, the custodian can execute an OTC sale and use the proceeds to repay the Aave debt. This is where V4's Hub-and-Spoke design starts becoming much more interesting. Aave can build a completely isolated institutional lending market without introducing an exposure path to its existing markets. And IMO this also puts Aave increasingly into the same addressable market as Maple. Maple has spent years building institutional secured lending, with borrower underwriting, legal agreements and collateral held with institutional custodians. Aave is approaching the same problem from the opposite direction. Maple: institutional credit platform → bringing more of the credit stack onchain Aave: onchain liquidity protocol → extending its liquidity infrastructure into institutional credit They are not the same model. But the market they are competing for is starting to overlap. The bigger implication for Aave V4 might be that “Aave markets” no longer need to look like one giant DeFi lending pool. Different Hubs can serve completely different forms of credit, with different collateral, permissions and risk models, while still using Aave as the underlying liquidity infrastructure. That feels like a much larger endgame for $AAVE.