Bitcoin Loans Face Liquidation Risks: Aave's 4.7 percent trap.

Aave governance has advanced a proposal that would give Bitcoin-backed borrowers materially more leverage while leaving less room before liquidation.

The proposal from risk service provider LlamaRisk would let users on Aave V3 Ethereum Core borrow as much as $0.81 against each $1 of WBTC or cbBTC collateral, up from $0.73. The liquidation threshold would rise from 78% to 85%.

LlamaRisk said on Sept. 21 that the proposal had advanced to Snapshot and voting would begin in less than 24 hours. The vote result and any implementation remained unverified at the reporting cutoff, so the higher limits are proposed parameters rather than live settings.

The case rests on one year of liquidation data showing that economically meaningful positions generally cleared within minutes. That history was recorded under existing parameters. It supports an argument for greater capital efficiency but cannot establish how the proposed settings would perform during the next extreme move.

Eight more cents of Bitcoin borrowing power

Loan-to-value, or LTV, sets the maximum debt that collateral can support. At 73% LTV, $100 of WBTC or cbBTC can support up to $73 of debt before reserve caps, available liquidity, asset eligibility and account-level constraints. At 81%, the same collateral could support up to $81.

The liquidation threshold marks the point where a position becomes eligible for liquidation. On Ethereum Core, the proposal would raise that threshold for WBTC and cbBTC from 78% to 85%.

Ethereum Core BTC parameter	Current	Proposed
Maximum LTV	73%	81%
Liquidation threshold	78%	85%
Collateral-price decline from maximum LTV to liquidation	About 6.4%	About 4.7%

The raw distance between LTV and the liquidation threshold would fall from five percentage points to four. The last table row expresses that distance as a collateral-price decline relative to the threshold, assuming debt remains unchanged and Bitcoin is the moving leg. Raising both parameters still narrows the borrower’s price cushion because the borrowing limit moves closer to the new liquidation line.

The changes extend beyond Ethereum Core. The proposal would raise Arbitrum WBTC’s ordinary LTV by five percentage points and Base cbBTC’s by eight points. Ethereum Core WETH, wstETH and weETH would each receive a 0.5-point LTV increase. Selected liquidation thresholds would also rise, while Base cbBTC’s liquidation bonus would fall from 7.5% to 6%. A separate Base cbBTC stablecoin E-Mode would move to 82% LTV and an 85% liquidation threshold.

These figures describe maximum capacity per dollar of eligible collateral. They do not quantify how much debt users would add. The proposal does not disclose a complete current dataset of collateral-enabled balances, debt attributed to each affected asset and account health factors. Total reserve supply would overstate usable collateral because some supplied tokens may be ineligible, disabled as collateral or unconnected to debt. Historical seized volume likewise does not reveal the live distribution of positions.

Minutes of liquidation history meet an hour-long tail model

LlamaRisk studied liquidation behavior from August 2025 through August 2026 across Ethereum Core, Arbitrum and Base.

On Ethereum Core, the analysis counted 7,206 ETH liquidations that seized $618 million and 2,621 BTC liquidations that seized $358 million. For both collateral families, the value-weighted 99th-percentile time a liquidation call spent at or below its execution price was five minutes.

That statistic measures a liquidation work-off window. It is different from saying that 99% of transactions executed within five minutes of an oracle update. Large positions can require several calls because a single liquidation generally repays only part of the debt.

The study separately measured processing after price-feed publications during the February and October 2025 stress windows. Its table reports that 100% of seized volume cleared within five minutes of the feed publication that made liquidation profitable in every listed market during those two events.

February produced no recognized deficit. October produced $0.39 million of event-level bad debt against roughly $128 million, although LlamaRisk said none affected the ETH- or BTC-family collateral analyzed for this proposal. The result suggests that liquidator response was not the binding constraint in those episodes; it does not recreate those events under the proposed higher leverage.

The model then combines a one-hour price excursion with each reserve’s liquidation bonus to derive a ceiling for the liquidation threshold. In the detailed table, the 99.9th-percentile adverse one-hour move was 11.85% for ETH and about 5% for BTC.

That percentile omits the most extreme 0.1% of one-hour observations in the two-year sample. The same record contained much larger moves: a worst one-hour ETH decline of 24.27% and a worst BTC decline of 10.72% in the detailed table. The proposal’s summary gives 11.15% for the BTC worst hour, an internal discrepancy, but either BTC figure is more than twice the roughly 5% percentile input.

The gap defines the residual risk. LlamaRisk’s framework assumes that regular oracle publications and responsive liquidators prevent a maximally leveraged position from sitting untouched for a full hour. A move beyond the percentile can become more damaging if price feeds stall, liquidation activity slows or market depth deteriorates at the same time.

The percentile therefore calibrates a protocol bad-debt buffer rather than a borrower protection level. A maximally borrowing BTC position could reach the proposed liquidation threshold after an approximately 4.7% collateral-price decline under the simplified single-asset calculation, even though the protocol model uses a roughly 5% BTC excursion plus the liquidation bonus to assess post-liquidation coverage.

The proposal leaves BTC thresholds below the model ceiling to account for depth, caps and concentration risks that price history does not capture. ETH receives less room: WETH is set at the model ceiling, while wstETH and weETH sit one point inside their ceilings.

The Bitcoin LTV vote weighs speed against leverage

Aave’s governance choice is whether observed liquidation performance under current parameters justifies allowing future positions to run closer to liquidation.

For Bitcoin collateral on Ethereum Core, the exchange is clear at the borrower level. Maximum LTV would rise eight percentage points, while the simplified collateral-price cushion at maximum leverage would shrink from about 6.4% to 4.7%. Existing borrowers would not automatically add debt, but the new limits would permit new or adjusted positions to carry more.

The protocol-level case is more favorable than the borrower-level cushion alone suggests. In LlamaRisk’s sample, economically meaningful liquidations were processed quickly, and the two studied stress windows left no bad debt on the reviewed ETH- and BTC-family collateral. The model also incorporates the liquidation bonus and keeps recommended BTC thresholds below its calculated ceiling.

Its limits are equally specific. Historical execution does not measure an outage that coincides with an exceptional price move. The worst one-hour declines in the same dataset exceeded the percentile inputs by a wide margin, and the model cannot remove liquidity, concentration or oracle risk.

The aggregate credit effect also remains unknown. Calculating it would require current collateral-enabled balances for every affected asset and market, the debt those positions already carry, their collateral settings and their health-factor distribution. The published proposal supplies the parameter change, not that full position-level dataset.

The forum says an implementation AIP would follow only after a positive Snapshot result. Until a vote and AIP establish the final values, the 81% Bitcoin LTV remains a governance proposal.

LlamaRisk’s study makes a measurable case that fast liquidation work-off can support greater collateral efficiency. The unresolved question is how much confidence Aave should place in that history when the danger lies in the hour that combines an unusually large market move with impaired pricing, liquidation or market depth.

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