Web3-focused software technology company Aave Companies is rebranding to Weightlessits founder Stani Kulechov told TechCrunch exclusively.
The parent crypto entity is best known for supporting Aave Labs, the Aave Protocol, native stablecoin GHO, and decentralized social network protocol Lens, among others. About $8.66 billion of liquidity is locked in Aave across eight networks and over 15 markets including Ethereum, Avalanche, Optimism, Polygon and Base, according to Website.
Before being called Aave and now Avara, the company was known as ETHLend. But this is the company’s final name change, Kulechov said TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast. Aave will still exist, but through the Aave Protocol and Aave Labs, under the Avara umbrella.
Avara also shared its strategic acquisition of Los Feliz Engineering, the team behind the Ethereum-based Family crypto wallet. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Avara plans to use the Family crypto wallet acquisition as a means to help users enter the web3 ecosystem. “We really want to send a message that we’re in an era now with web3 where we’re building this interface into the existing infrastructure where people can actually interact in a way that’s familiar to them,” Kulechov said.
The crypto wallet is currently in beta, but users can download it to try it out. This is the company’s second acquisition after acquiring Sonar, a metaverse mobile app, in December 2022.
However, the rebrand and acquisition signal the company’s willingness to “do more” and focus beyond DeFi by bringing web3 to “all users globally with different kinds of use cases,” Kulechov said. This new mission nods to the rebrand, Avara, which symbolizes a Finnish colloquial meaning of “seeing more than meets the eye,” Kulechov said.
“We’ve always been known for creating decentralized finance [tools] and using blockchain to create smart contract-based protocols,” Kulechov said. “More recently, with the Lens Protocol, we’ve created essentially social, so decentralized social media that virtually any developer can actually build their apps on top of it.”
Looking at Avara’s entities, Kulechov said he is most excited about Lens because there are “micro-communities” within the protocol such as web3 social apps Orb and Phaver. Lens has been in beta since May 2022, but Kulechov hopes to have it out by the end of 2023.
This story was inspired by an episode of TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast. Sign up in Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to hear more stories and advice from the entrepreneurs building today’s most innovative companies.
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