Justin Sun announces $20m boost for Aave as he calls on lender to expand to his blockchain

Crypto mogul Justin Sun has announced a $20 million liquidity injection for Aave, and called on the top DeFi lender to expand to Tron, the blockchain he founded in 2017.

Sporting some $5.3 billion in deposits, Tron is the fifth biggest blockchain for decentralised finance. It has a cult following thanks to its billionaire founder, and a strong user base across Asia and several developing countries.

Yet despite its size, Aave has yet to deploy code there. Sun wants that to change.

“TRON and HTX stand together with AAVE jointly supplying $20M USDT to AAVE Core V3 Market in a show of support to bring AAVE to TRON. DeFi United!” Sun said in a Monday X post.

HTX, a Seychelles-based crypto exchange, is also owned by Sun.

The Tron founder’s pledge of support comes after North Korea stole some $293 million from KelpDAO, an Ethereum DeFi protocol, on April 18.

The hackers deposited $200 million of the stolen assets as collateral on Aave and borrowed large amounts of Ether. This left Aave with at least $177 million in unrecoverable bad debt.

A coordinated effort among big names in DeFi, coupled with partial recoveries of the stolen funds, have helped Aave plug the hole. So far, the lender has secured $160 million — around 80% — of the needed coverage.

Sun previously pleaded with the Kelp DAO hackers to return the stolen funds.

Aave on Tron

Whether or not to deploy Aave on the Tron blockchain isn’t a new debate.

In April last year, Aave-Chan Initiative, an Aave DAO service…