Aave V3.8 Officially Launches: Covering 15 Public Chains and a $15.2 Billion Liquidity Pool, Introducing a Low-Gas-Cost Anti-Reentrancy Mechanism

Author: TechFlow

On November 12, the lending protocol Aave announced that the V3.8 version, developed by Aave Labs and approved by Aave DAO, has officially launched across 15 Aave V3 markets, introducing kernel-level reentrancy protection for external pool callback operations.

Data from DeFiLlama shows that as of November 12, Aave's total value locked (TVL) exceeded $16.4 billion, with over $15.23 billion held across active V3 markets. According to the Aave official announcement, the upgrade covers active instances across 15 public blockchains.

Governance Proposal Rolled Out in 22 Days, Precisely Targeting Active Pools

Tracing back the governance process, Aave Labs released the Aave V3.8 Governance Forum Proposal on October 21, followed by a Snapshot vote on October 27. On November 9, the community initiated the AIP #541 On-Chain Governance Vote, completing the deployment and launch over a 22-day period.

V3.8 adopts a restrained deployment strategy, covering active instances on Ethereum (Core and Lido), Plasma, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Monad, Base, and Arbitrum.

This release also simultaneously covers markets on Mantle, X Layer, Polygon, Linea, Optimism, Gnosis, MegaETH, and Celo, explicitly skipping legacy markets that are frozen and have cleared limits.

Leveraging EIP-1153 Transient Storage, Read/Write Costs Drop to 100 Gas

In contract architecture, the standard practice to prevent cross-function reentrancy is to write a lock flag before core state changes. However, after the implementation of EIP-3529, the refund cap for SSTORE state clearing dropped to 20%, making it costly for high-frequency lending pools to maintain persistent locks due to high gas consumption.

To address this, Aave V3.8 implements the EIP-1153 Transient Storage Specification. A single TSTORE and TLOAD operation consumes only 100 Gas and automatically clears at the end of the transaction, securing pool anti-reentrancy protection at a minimal cost.

Asymmetric Lock Balances Flash Loan Liquidations with Reentrancy Boundaries

Prior to launch, some developers were concerned whether the reentrancy lock might interrupt liquidation compositions during flash loan callbacks. Aave Labs clarified that flashLoan and flashLoanSimple entry points only check the lock status without actually setting a lock.

This asymmetric design achieves bidirectional isolation: when a flash loan is initiated first, liquidations, deposits, or repayments can still be combined within the callback; however, if the outer layer is already in the middle of a regular pool operation callback, requests to initiate another flash loan will be directly intercepted and rolled back.

Open-Sourced Delivery After Multi-Party Audits, Notes Read-Only Interface Boundaries

Regarding security verification, V3.8 completed formal verification by Certora and audits by an independent external security team before submitting to the AIP vote. The new contract code has been published under the Business Source License (BSL) in the official Aave V3 code repository.

Community developers also warned downstream integrators that when external protocols read pool view functions (such as account health factors or reserve data) during callbacks, they must still be mindful of boundary conditions where the underlying ledger is in a transitional state, ensuring compatibility with peripheral risk controls.