GHO is Aave’s decentralized, over-collateralized stablecoin designed to track the U.S. dollar. Users can mint it through governance-approved facilitators, including borrowing against eligible collateral in Aave; each facilitator operates within capacity and risk parameters set through Aave governance. GHO has also expanded beyond Ethereum through approved cross-chain mechanisms, so the chain and contract matter when holding or transferring it.
Market Snapshot: GHO
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Ticker | GHO |
| Price | $0.9984 |
| Market Cap | $697.873 million |
| 24-Hour Change | 0.00% |
| 24-Hour Volume | $3.824 million |
| Circulating / Total Supply | 699 million |
CoinGecko page snapshot: 2026-10-20. Live values can change; this is not investment advice.
Tokenomics and supply
GHO does not have a fixed maximum supply. Facilitators can mint GHO within their approved caps, while repayment, redemption, and other burn mechanisms can reduce supply. The total outstanding amount therefore depends on demand, collateral and facilitator capacity, and governance-set parameters rather than a scheduled halving or a preset token allocation. CoinGecko’s market-cap and supply figures are reported estimates, not cash held in a GHO reserve account.
GHO is the stablecoin itself; AAVE is the separate Aave governance token. Holding GHO does not automatically give the holder AAVE voting rights or a fixed yield. Aave governance controls facilitator approvals and certain risk settings, and the market price can move away from one dollar even though the protocol is designed to support that peg.
Facilitators, collateral, and the peg
A facilitator is an approved contract or protocol that can create or burn GHO under a defined capacity. In the Aave V3 Ethereum market, users supply eligible collateral and borrow newly minted GHO; other approved facilitators support functions such as cross-chain transfers, stability-module conversions, or flash minting. Their individual caps and parameters limit how much GHO can be created through each route.
Over-collateralization and market arbitrage can help support the peg, but neither removes risk. Collateral prices can fall, positions can be liquidated, liquidity can become thin, and a facilitator or bridge can fail. Cross-chain GHO also depends on the approved messaging and token contracts on both the source and destination networks; matching ticker symbols are not enough to identify the correct asset.
GHO and the sGHO savings vault
GHO itself does not automatically accrue interest in a wallet. Aave’s separate Savings GHO product, sGHO, is an ERC-4626 vault: a user deposits GHO and receives vault shares whose value in GHO can increase as the vault’s on-chain rate accrues. Aave’s current documentation says deposits and withdrawals are designed to be available without a cooldown and that the new vault replaces a legacy Merit-based contract.
sGHO is not the same thing as GHO and its target rate is not a guaranteed return. Users moving from the old contract should follow Aave’s current instructions rather than assume old rewards continue automatically. The vault adds its own smart-contract, rate, liquidity, and stablecoin risks on top of the risks of holding GHO.
Social Media Sentiment
A March 2026 r/ethereum daily discussion included a GHO savings user asking why a displayed sGHO reward balance had disappeared; replies discussed the old reward flow and user expectations. This is one dated interface and rewards anecdote, not evidence of a current protocol-wide fault, and it predates the newer ERC-4626 sGHO vault described in Aave’s current docs. Read the referenced Reddit discussion.
Last updated: 2026-10
Related Terms
See Also
- What Is Tokenomics — And Why It Determines Whether a Crypto Project Survives
- How Do Crypto Bridges Work — And Why Are They Such a Hack Target?
- Why Algorithmic Stablecoins Keep Failing (And Why People Keep Trying Anyway)
- Explore crypto with ChangeNOW
Sources
- Aave Documentation — GHO — Explains GHO’s over-collateralized design, facilitator roles, caps, minting, and supported cross-chain mechanisms.
- Aave Documentation — Savings GHO (sGHO) — Describes the current ERC-4626 sGHO vault, its target-rate data, withdrawal behavior, and replacement of the legacy Merit-based contract.
- CoinGecko — GHO — Provides the dated GHO market-price, volume, market-cap and supply snapshot; values may change.