Aave
Aave was created in Finland by Stani Kulechov, a young master of law and a recent graduate of the University of Helsinki. Initially, it was a decentralised crypto lending platform based on the De-Fi protocol and was used to provide an opportunity to lend and borrow cryptocurrencies at both floating and fixed fees.
Influenced by Ethereum, Stani founded his company ETHLend in 2017. In that year, the project managed a $16.2 million ICO. The main product was a new P2P platform of a similar type, like the one described above. Users might trade branded LEND tokens and manage to sell more than a billion of them before they faced a lack of liquidity as early as 2018.
The project had to be transformed and turned into Aave, which means 'ghost' in Finnish. The developers chose this name to intrigue users with a wide range of innovative technologies for decentralised finance.
However, the AAVE token appeared much later than the platform at the end of 2020. At that time, the previous LEND coins were exchanged for new ones at a ratio of 100 to 1. The Aave V2 main net, which is still operating today, went live a couple of months later, also in 2020.