Aave community pushes GHO stablecoin growth with governance votes, including proposal for yield-bearing 'savings' token

Aave, the major Ethereum-based lending protocol, is looking to create a "sGHO" savings product built around its native GHO stablecoin and a new "Aave Savings Rate."

The move is part of a trend of onchain stablecoins offering to expand the capabilities and use-cases of fiat-pegged tokens while rewarding holders. Assets like "savings USDS" by MakerDAO and Noble’s USDN.

"Aave’s GHO stablecoin is growing strongly during 2025 and is the 20th largest stablecoin," a "temp check" governance proposal reads. "Whilst growth to date has been strong, growing from 200M to over 300M presents a different set of challenges requiring a different approach."

GHO, launched in 2023 and governed by the Aave DAO, was designed to enhance Aave's ecosystem by offering competitive stablecoin borrowing, generate revenue for the DAO through interest payments and address DeFi’s need for a decentralized onchain stablecoin.

sGHO features

According to the proposal submitted by the Aave Chan Initiative, sGHO aims to serve as "a low risk savings product." Like many yield-bearing stablecoins, sGHO would be a complimentary asset to a "staking token" used to secure a protocol.

"By depositing GHO into sGHO, users will earn the Aave Savings Rate by holding an ERC-20 receipt token accruing value over time which is easily integrated with other protocols," the proposal reads. "sGHO is to be sustained from revenue generated by Aave Protocol and is specifically designed to have the lowest risk profile of Aave DAO’s yield product offering."

This deposited GHO will be locked in the sGHO contract rather than being rehypothecated to "minimize risk." The savings rate will be determined in part by the amount of sGHO minted by users — with a larger “holding base” resulting in lower returns or additional funding. In particular, the Aave Savings Rate will be tied to the native yield generated by “USDC Native Yield” on Aave’s V3 on the Ethereum mainnet.

"Aave DAO is in a very fortunate financial position that is supportive of pursuing an aggressive growth strategy that captures the upside during what is a depressed yield market relative to late Q4, 2024," the proposal said. "Launching sGHO with a premium to other similar savings products is expected to lead to significant growth."

Driving GHO adoption

Additionally, users will not have to pay withdrawal or deposit fees.

"Being a yield product, creating friction via fees would act to reduce the appeal of the offering placing sGHO at a disadvantage to similar offerings available in the market," the proposal reads, noting sGHO "is most similar" to the sUSDS offering from the Sky Ecosystem.

sGHO appears to be part of a series of initiatives aimed at growing GHO’s user base, including a proposal to introduce the stablecoin as “a gas token” across different blockchains in an expansion of Aave’s " GHO cross-chain strategy ." That temp check passed with 100% of the vote two days ago.

Likewise, there have been other individual proposals to expand GHO into the Fluid ecosystem, Arbitrum and other ecosystems.

The move comes shortly after Aave passed the second half of its updated funding proposal , which appears to aimed at reducing risks for the protocol and improve liquidity on Aave v3. The DAO voted to approve a treasury rebalancing, including redeploying assets like USDC, DAI, BAL, CRV from Aave instances on Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism to the Ethereum base layer, among other moves in a bid to support “native USDC adoption” on Aave.