Aave vs NAVI: Ethereum's Lender and Sui's Compared

Aave is a multi-chain lender with about $16.1 billion of TVL, while NAVI is a Sui-only lender with about $141 million, and NAVI's lending design borrows heavily from Aave V3 while adding Sui-specific pieces. Both figures are from DefiLlama on 31 October 2026. The useful differences sit below the headline size gap: how each one prices collateral, who covers bad debt, and what went wrong at each in 2026.

This is a head-to-head. For every Aave alternative on Sui side by side, read Aave alternatives on Sui.

Aave vs NAVI at a glance

Sources: DefiLlama Aave, DefiLlama NAVI Lending, each protocol's documentation, and DefiLlama's hacks database, all checked 31 October 2026. DefiLlama counts lending TVL as supplied minus borrowed.

Scale and reach

Aave V3 alone held about $15.0 billion on 31 October 2026, and $12.5 billion of that was on Ethereum. Its Base and Arbitrum markets each held close to $490 million, more than NAVI's entire book. Aave V4, launched on Ethereum on 30 March 2026, held about $671 million across its first chains.

NAVI runs on Sui alone. DefiLlama has tracked NAVI Lending since August 2023, and it peaked at about $661 million on 28 July 2025 before falling with the rest of Sui DeFi. On 31 October 2026 it was level with Suilend at the top of Sui lending; the whole Sui chain held about $462 million that day. Our NAVI vs Suilend covers that race.

Size matters to a user in a concrete way. A pool with a few million dollars of a given asset can swing from normal to full utilization when one large account withdraws, and at full utilization nobody can withdraw until borrowers repay. Aave's largest pools rarely face that from a single wallet. NAVI's smaller ones can.

Market design

Aave V3 is a set of pooled markets per chain. You supply several assets and borrow against their combined value under one health factor. E-Mode raises loan-to-value for correlated assets, and since V3.7 an E-Mode category can be isolated so only its own collateral counts. Aave's V3 overview says V3.7 also removed the older Isolation Mode and siloed borrowing, replacing them with isolated E-Mode categories.

NAVI offers two modes on its borrow page. "By Market" is the Aave-style shared pool. "By Pair" uses isolated single-pair markets with their own margin and higher LTVs, and NAVI picks the market with the highest LTV for your pair by default (NAVI borrow guide). Its E-Mode pairs include vSUI against SUI at 90% LTV and stablecoin pairs such as USDC against suiUSDT at 90%. Each E-Mode pair runs as a separate position, so a liquidation there leaves your main market position alone.

In practice the two have converged. Both now let a correlated pair borrow at high LTV inside a walled-off position. NAVI reached that design through separate pair markets. Aave reached it by making E-Mode categories isolatable, and V4 goes further by letting each spoke set its own collateral rules.

Oracles

Aave uses Chainlink price feeds for most assets and a Correlated Assets Price Oracle (CAPO) for assets that track another asset, such as wstETH. CAPO caps how fast an exchange rate can grow, which limits manipulation. On 10 March 2026 that cap misfired: a configuration mismatch priced wstETH below market, and about $26 million of E-Mode positions on Ethereum Core and Prime were liquidated unfairly. Chaos Labs said Aave took on no bad debt, and a compensation plan used recovered ETH plus up to 345 ETH from the DAO treasury (The Block).

NAVI uses Pyth as the primary feed for each asset, with Supra cross-checking most of them, and rejects any price outside a per-asset minimum and maximum (NAVI price oracles). For SUI the accepted range is $0.10 to $5. Bounds block wild readings, and they also need updating if a real price moves outside them. Our price oracle explainer covers why this layer causes so many lending failures.

Governance tokens

AAVE has a 16 million total supply, set when it replaced LEND in 2020, per Aave's Aavenomics flashpaper. Holders vote on protocol changes through the Aave DAO, and AAVE can be staked in the legacy Safety Module.

NAVX has a 1 billion maximum supply. Holders vote on listings, incentivized pools and major updates. Its main lending utility is dLP: you provide NAVX liquidity on a DEX, lock the LP tokens, and must lock at least 2.5% of your deposit's USD value to receive NAVX emissions on supply and borrow. dLP lockers also get a share of borrowing fees, per the NAVX tokenomics. Rewards in either token change often, so judge a market on its base rate.

Who covers bad debt

Here the two differ most. Aave's Umbrella lets users stake aTokens (aUSDC, aUSDT, aWETH) and GHO; if an asset on a given network runs a deficit, the matching stakes can be burned to cover it. Umbrella is live on Ethereum for those four assets and is gradually replacing the old Safety Module.

The April 2026 Kelp exploit tested it. An attacker used a forged bridge message to release 116,500 unbacked rsETH, supplied about 89,500 rsETH to Aave and borrowed about 82,650 WETH against it. Aave froze the affected markets, and its service providers modeled bad debt between about $124 million and $230 million depending on how Kelp allocated the loss. The WETH Umbrella module held about $54 million and was relevant only to the Ethereum Core share (Aave incident report). The final split was not settled in that report.

NAVI's public docs, checked 31 October 2026, describe no comparable staked backstop. Its defenses are on the front end: per-asset LTVs and liquidation thresholds, isolated markets, and partial liquidations that repay up to 35% of a borrower's debt at a time. If a liquidation ever fails to cover a debt on NAVI, the docs do not say who absorbs it. Ask that before supplying size. Our guide to DeFi liquidations explains how shortfalls arise.

Incident history

DefiLlama's hacks database lists two Aave entries: a $56,000 arbitrary-call loss in August 2024 and an $862,000 Aave V3 entry dated 12 March 2026 under oracle misconfiguration. The Kelp exploit is recorded under Kelp, at $293 million. For NAVI it lists no lending incident. It does record a $3.5 million private-key compromise at Volo Vault, part of the NAVI group, on 21 April 2026. DefiLlama tracks Volo's vSUI liquid staking token as a separate entry from that vault; see what is Volo vSUI.

A clean record on a smaller protocol says less than it seems. Aave's 2026 problems came from an oracle layer and a third-party collateral token, two risks NAVI also carries through its oracle setup and its LST and Bitcoin collateral. NAVI's largest collateral assets on 31 October 2026 were enzoBTC, haSUI and vSUI, per DefiLlama.

Who each one fits

• Aave fits users on Ethereum or its L2s who want the deepest pools, Chainlink pricing, a staked backstop and GHO, and who accept exposure to whatever collateral it lists, as the rsETH episode showed.
• NAVI fits Sui users who hold SUI, vSUI, haSUI or Bitcoin on Sui and want E-Mode or isolated pair markets, and who accept thinner pools and no documented bad-debt backstop.

If you are new to NAVI, start with what is NAVI Protocol and the step-by-step how to use NAVI. For Aave, see what is Aave. The whole Sui market is mapped in Sui TVL on DefiLlama in 2026.

JewelSwap runs no pooled lending market like either one; on Sui it offers leveraged yield farms built on Scallop and NFT-collateralized lending.

Frequently asked questions

Is NAVI the Aave of Sui?

On design, it comes close. NAVI has a shared pool mode, isolated pair markets, E-Mode pairs, flash loans and a governance token, like Aave V3. On size it is far smaller: about $141 million of TVL against Aave's $16.1 billion on 31 October 2026, per DefiLlama.

Is Aave on Sui?

No. DefiLlama listed Aave on 23 chains on 31 October 2026, including Aptos, but not Sui. NAVI and Suilend are the largest lenders on Sui.

Which oracles do Aave and NAVI use?

Aave uses Chainlink price feeds plus CAPO for correlated assets such as wstETH. NAVI uses Pyth as the primary feed, cross-checks most assets with Supra and rejects prices outside set bounds.

Does NAVI have a safety module like Aave?

NAVI's documentation, checked 31 October 2026, describes no staked backstop. Aave's Umbrella lets stakers of aTokens and GHO cover deficits in the same asset, and it is replacing Aave's older Safety Module.

What is the difference between AAVE and NAVX?

AAVE has a 16 million total supply and governs the Aave DAO. NAVX has a 1 billion maximum supply, governs NAVI, and is used through locked dLP positions that make NAVI users eligible for NAVX emissions and a share of borrowing fees.

Educational only, not financial advice. TVL and borrowed figures from DefiLlama, features and token details from Aave and NAVI documentation, and incidents from DefiLlama, Aave governance and The Block, checked 31 October 2026. DeFi lending carries smart-contract, oracle, liquidation and depeg risk.