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What Is GHO?

GHO (ticker GHO) is a decentralized, overcollateralized US dollar stablecoin native to the Aave protocol. It went live on Ethereum mainnet on July 15, 2023, after an Aave DAO governance vote, and it is issued as a standard ERC-20 token at contract address 0x40D16FC0246aD3160Ccc09B8D0D3A2cD28aE6C2f. As of July 2026 there are roughly 600 million GHO in circulation, worth about 598 million dollars, and the token trades at around $0.998.

GHO is not backed by a company holding dollars in a bank. It is backed by crypto collateral locked inside Aave. Users mint GHO by borrowing it against assets they have already supplied to the Aave V3 market on Ethereum, and the collateral keeps earning supply yield while it sits there. Because every position must be overcollateralized, the value of the collateral behind GHO is always greater than the GHO outstanding. If a position becomes unsafe, it is liquidated the same way any other Aave loan would be. For more on the lending protocol underneath it, see our guide to Aave.

The mechanism that makes GHO unusual is where the interest goes. On a normal Aave loan, the borrower pays interest to the suppliers of that asset. With GHO there are no suppliers, because the token is minted out of thin air against collateral and burned on repayment. All the interest paid by GHO borrowers goes straight to the Aave DAO treasury, which makes GHO one of the protocol's largest revenue lines.

Supply is controlled through entities called facilitators. A facilitator is a contract that Aave governance has authorized to mint and burn GHO, and each one is given a bucket with a capacity, which is the maximum GHO it is allowed to have outstanding at any time. The current facilitators include the Aave V3 Ethereum pool (ordinary borrowing), a FlashMinter for flash loans of GHO, the GHO Stability Module contracts, and the Chainlink CCIP token pool used for bridging. Governance can add or remove facilitators and raise or lower bucket capacities, which is the main lever on total supply. Day-to-day parameter tuning within pre-approved limits is delegated to the GHO Stewards, a 3-of-4 multisig of risk, growth, and finance service providers set up in April 2024. That line-up is in flux: two of the service providers holding Steward seats announced their departure from the Aave DAO during 2026, and the seats are being reassigned.

GHO is governed by the Aave DAO, and it is important not to confuse the two tokens. AAVE is the governance token that votes on GHO's interest rate, its facilitators, and which chains it deploys to. GHO is the stablecoin those votes control. Holding GHO gives you no governance rights.

GHO's peg history is the weak point in its early record. The token launched without a peg stability mechanism, and it spent most of its first seven months below a dollar, hovering near $0.97 through late 2023 and dipping as low as roughly $0.92 in October 2023. The DAO's response was twofold: it repeatedly raised the GHO borrow rate to make minting and dumping GHO unattractive, and in late January 2024 it shipped the GHO Stability Module (GSM). The GSM lets anyone swap approved stablecoins (USDC and USDT) for GHO at a fixed 1:1 ratio minus a small fee, with governance-set exposure caps and an oracle-driven freeze that halts swaps if the paired stablecoin itself moves. That gave arbitrageurs a direct way to push the price back toward a dollar in both directions. GHO recovered to its peg in February 2024 and has traded within a fraction of a cent of a dollar since, though it usually sits marginally under, near $0.998.

GHO originates on Ethereum and moves to other chains through Chainlink CCIP, with tokens locked or burned on Ethereum when they are bridged out. Deployments now include Arbitrum (July 2024), Avalanche (June 2025), Gnosis Chain (August 2025), Base, Mantle, Ink, Plasma, and Monad (July 2026). One more piece worth knowing: stkAAVE holders originally got a discount on the GHO borrow rate, but that discount has been deprecated. Under the Aavenomics overhaul proposed in March 2025, it was replaced by "Anti-GHO," a non-transferable token minted to AAVE and stkBPT stakers out of roughly half of GHO's revenue, which can be burned 1:1 against GHO debt or converted into the savings token sGHO. The practical difference is that the benefit now reaches all stakers rather than only those who happen to be borrowing GHO.

Getting Started With GHO

There are two ways in: mint GHO yourself against collateral, or simply buy it on an exchange. Minting is the native path.

  1. Step 1: Connect an Ethereum wallet to the Aave app and supply collateral (ETH, wstETH, AAVE, stablecoins, and other approved assets) to the Aave V3 market.
  2. Step 2: Borrow GHO against that collateral. Your collateral continues to earn supply yield, and the interest you pay on the GHO goes to the Aave DAO treasury.
  3. Step 3: Watch your health factor. GHO is a loan like any other on Aave, and if the health factor falls below 1 your collateral can be liquidated.
  4. Step 4: Optionally deposit GHO into Savings GHO (sGHO), an ERC-4626 vault that pays a fixed APR (4.25 percent as of mid-2026) with no lockup or cooldown.

How to Get a GHO Wallet?

GHO is a plain ERC-20 token, so any Ethereum-compatible wallet holds it. The chain matters more than the wallet: make sure you are on a network where GHO is actually deployed.

MetaMask

MetaMask is the most common way to interact with Aave and mint GHO. It supports Ethereum plus the layer-2 and sidechain networks GHO has been bridged to, and it connects directly to the Aave web app.

Rabby

Rabby is popular with DeFi users for its clearer transaction previews and automatic network switching, which is useful when you are managing a collateralized borrow position and want to see exactly what a transaction will do before signing.

Coinbase Wallet

Coinbase Wallet (the self-custody app, not the exchange account) holds GHO and can reach the Aave app through its dApp browser.

Hardware Wallets

For larger balances, a Ledger or Trezor connected through MetaMask keeps the keys offline while still letting you supply collateral, mint GHO, and repay.

GHO Resources

How to Buy GHO?

GHO is a DeFi-native stablecoin, so most of its liquidity lives on decentralized exchanges rather than centralized ones. Trading volume is modest, a few million dollars a day in mid-2026, so large orders should be sized carefully.

Centralized Exchanges

Centralized listings for GHO are limited compared with USDC or USDT. Gate is the main centralized venue, with Bitget a distant second, and the largest exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken, Binance) do not list GHO at all. Most buyers therefore acquire GHO by first buying ETH or a mainstream stablecoin on an exchange, then swapping into GHO on-chain.

Decentralized Exchanges

On Ethereum, the deepest GHO markets are on Uniswap and Curve, mostly in stablecoin pairs against USDC and USDT. Fund a wallet with ETH for gas, connect, and swap. GHO can also be minted directly on Aave rather than bought, which is often the cheaper route if you already hold collateral there.

Latest GHO News

GHO's supply has grown sharply, passing 500 million dollars in 2026 and reaching roughly 600 million by mid-year, helped by the launch of Savings GHO (sGHO), an ERC-4626 vault that pays a fixed rate (4.25 percent APR as of mid-2026, benchmarked slightly above the Sky Savings Rate) with no cooldown or slashing risk. Expansion continued in July 2026 when Aave deployed V3 on Monad with GHO among the borrowable assets, a market that drew more than 100 million dollars in deposits within two days.

The year has not been all good news, and the most important recent event happened to GHO's issuer rather than to GHO itself. On April 18, 2026, an attacker exploited a bridge belonging to KelpDAO and minted unbacked rsETH, then deposited it into Aave as collateral and borrowed against it. It was the largest DeFi exploit of 2026, and Aave was left carrying an estimated 124 million to 230 million dollars of bad debt, with a heavy outflow of deposits in the days that followed. GHO came through it intact: the token held its peg throughout the episode, never trading outside a fraction of a cent of a dollar, because GHO is minted against collateral posted on Aave rather than being backed by Aave's own balance sheet. Even so, anyone holding GHO should understand that its fortunes are tied to the health of the protocol that issues it.

Aave has also been through a period of governance upheaval. Several long-standing service providers, including the Aave Chan Initiative (which authored the Aavenomics overhaul that reshaped GHO's economics and which grew GHO's supply from tens of millions to hundreds of millions) and BGD Labs, announced during 2026 that they were leaving the DAO. The departing providers have cited disagreements over Aave Labs' influence and over budgets and risk management. Those are their characterizations, they are disputed, and no link has been established between the departures and the April exploit. But the practical effect is that some of the people who built and governed GHO are stepping back, and the GHO Stewards seats are changing hands.

On July 9, 2026, Aave Labs launched Stable Vaults, a product that lets fintech apps embed fixed-rate stablecoin yield on USDC, USDT, and GHO without their users touching DeFi directly. The Aave governance forum remains the best place to follow GHO's borrow rate, facilitator bucket capacities, and new chain deployments, since all of them are decided by AAVE holders.