San Francisco–based Stable Finance has been acquired by Aave Labs, the developer behind the Aave lending ecosystem, as the firm expands into consumer-facing onchain services.
Founded in 2023, Stable Finance’s mobile app allows users to deposit funds from bank accounts, cards, or crypto wallets to earn yield on stablecoins through overcollateralized decentralized markets.
The deal, announced Thursday, also brings Stable Finance’s founder Mario Baxter Cabrera and his engineering team into Aave Labs. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The deal signals Aave’s effort to balance retail services with its continued push into institutional markets. The protocol recently announced an integration with Maple Finance’s yield-bearing stablecoins and the launch of Horizon, its institutional marketplace for tokenized assets.
Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave Labs, said the acquisition “reinforces our commitment to turning onchain finance into everyday finance.”
Launched in January 2020, Aave has over $37.25 billion in total value locked (TVL) as of this writing, according to data from DefiLlama.
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The debate over yield-bearing stablecoins
Aave isn’t the first protocol or company to offer users yield generated through overcollateralized DeFi markets and stablecoin lending strategies.
In September, Coinbase integrated the DeFi lending protocol Morpho directly into its app, allowing customers to lend USDC and earn yield. The update provided users access to onchain lending markets offering returns of up to 10.8%, more than double the 4.5% available through Coinbase’s standard USDC rewards program.
A similar collaboration between Crypto.com and Morpho was unveiled in early October, bringing Morpho’s stablecoin lending markets to the exchange’s Cronos blockchain. The integration allows users to deposit wrapped ETH into Morpho vaults and borrow stablecoins against their collateral to earn yield.
While the GENIUS Act, passed in July 2025, prohibits yield-bearing stablecoins, it does not explicitly restrict DeFi lending protocols or prevent exchanges from offering yield through onchain markets.
This gap in regulation has caused an uproar from traditional banks, which claim stablecoin loopholes allow unfair competition that could drain trillions in deposits from the US banking system.
But many in the crypto space see it differently. On Sept. 16, Coinbase published a blog post arguing that “institutions now warning of ‘systemic risk’ are the same ones pocketing tens of billions from card processing fees, which stablecoins could bypass entirely.”
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