How GHO holds its peg

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Just borrowed, repaid and swapped

GHO tokens GHO going back to Aave liquidator, or a CCIP message a chain's ledger flashes as it settles backing: Aave loans, Horizon loans, GSMs

A borrower supplies $60 M of ETH to Aave Core and borrows 30 M GHO: a collateral ratio of 200 %. WETH counts for 83 % of its value, so the loan is liquidated below about 120 %. The debt grows at the GHO borrow rate, 4.34 % a year on October 1, 2026. The GHO was already minted into the pool by the Core facilitator, up to its 250 M bucket; borrowing hands it out. It's on Ethereum, settled by its validators.
The GHO Stability Module swaps 20 M USDT for 20 M GHO, with no fee going in and 0.10 % coming back out. The GSM draws the GHO from a reserve minted in advance and puts the USDT to work in Aave as an aToken. When GHO trades under a dollar, selling it back for USDT puts a floor under it.
Holders pass GHO around Ethereum. 25 M goes into sGHO, earning the Aave Savings Rate, 4.50 % a year, paid by the Aave DAO. 3 M crosses to Plasma over Chainlink CCIP: locked in an escrow on Ethereum and minted by GHO's token pool on Plasma, which is a facilitator there with its own bucket.
The borrower pays back 10 M GHO. It returns to the pool, out of circulation, the debt falls to 20 M and a third of the ETH can be withdrawn. The ratio stays at 200 %.
ETH's Chainlink price falls 45 % and the ratio drops to 110 %: a health factor of 0.91. There's no auction. Anyone can repay the debt and take the collateral at a fixed discount, 5 % for WETH. Below a health factor of 0.95 the whole debt can go at once, so a liquidator repays 20 M GHO and takes $21 M of ETH; the rest stays with the borrower.
On October 1, 2026 the GHO that facilitators had handed out came to about 256 M: 162.9 M borrowed on Aave Core and Prime against crypto, 30.4 M on Aave Horizon against tokenized Treasuries and credit, and 63.1 M sold by the GSMs for USDT. Of the 699 M GHO that exist, about 235 M is in someone's hands; the rest waits in Aave's reserves, its pools or a bridge escrow.

The gauge reads GHO's markets from Aave's API and the GSMs from the chain every minute. Liquidations of GHO loans on Ethereum appear when they happen; they're rare.

Supply by chain Reading supplies…

How this is read

GHO on each chain, from its token contract, less what isn't in anyone's hands: the reserves Aave minted for its GSMs, the GHO waiting in Aave's pools to be borrowed, and on Ethereum the CCIP escrow, whose tokens are counted on their own chains. GHO in sGHO has its own row. Use the arrow keys to read each row.

Minted and burned

into circulation, up
back to Aave, down

What just happened (illustrative) 0 GHO in circulation 0 collateral 0 minted 0 burned 0 chains shown

The parts that make this work

A stablecoin minted by facilitators

The Aave DAO launched GHO on Ethereum in July 2023. The token contract keeps a list of facilitators, contracts the DAO has approved to mint and burn GHO, and gives each a bucket: a cap on how much it may have out. A facilitator can't mint past its bucket, and governance can raise, lower or remove it. Until July 2025 the Aave pool's GHO aToken was itself the facilitator and minted GHO the moment someone borrowed. Aave v3.4 replaced it with a "direct minter" that mints GHO and supplies it to the pool in advance, so GHO is now lent like any other asset in Aave.

Read from the GHO token on October 1, 2026, each facilitator's bucket and how much of it was used:

GHO facilitators on Ethereum, October 1, 2026
Facilitator	Bucket	Minted
GSMs on Ethereum (GHO reserve)	310,000,000	310,000,000
Aave Core direct minter	250,000,000	135,000,000
Aave Horizon direct minter	80,000,000	59,000,000
Aave Prime direct minter	175,000,000	45,000,000
Plasma GSM (bridged)	50,000,000	50,000,000
Arbitrum GSM (bridged)	50,000,000	50,000,000
Monad GSM (bridged)	50,000,000	50,000,000
Flash minter	2,000,000	0

The buckets add up to the token's total supply, 699,000,000 GHO. Read with getFacilitatorsList and getFacilitator on 0x40D1…6C2f.

699 M minted, about 235 M in circulation

Market data sites count all 699 M GHO, but most of it is waiting. On October 1, 2026 the GHO reserve behind the Ethereum GSMs held 287.6 M that nobody had bought, and the reserves for the Arbitrum, Monad and Plasma GSMs held another 109.3 M. 56.4 M sat unborrowed in Aave's Core, Prime and Horizon pools. A further 126.8 M was locked in the CCIP escrow on Ethereum, the other side of the copies on other chains.

What's left is about 235 M GHO in someone's hands: 169.7 M of it in sGHO, 58.3 M elsewhere on Ethereum and 7.3 M on other chains, most of it on Ink, Plasma and Monad. This page counts that figure. A little of the "unborrowed" GHO in the pools was supplied by users rather than minted by Aave: about 10.8 M on Ethereum.

Borrowing GHO

Anyone who supplies collateral to an Aave market that lists GHO can borrow it. Unlike other assets, the GHO in a pool is minted by the DAO's facilitator rather than deposited by lenders, so the rate is set by governance through the GHO stewards instead of only by supply and demand. The Core rate rose from 3.75 % to 4.25 % (as an APR) in two steps in August and September 2026 to slow borrowing while the GSMs were losing backing. On October 1, 2026, from Aave's API:

GHO markets on Aave, Ethereum, October 1, 2026
Market	Borrowed	Cap	Rate (APY)	Collateral
Aave Core	116,078,362	150 M	4.34 %	ETH, BTC, staked ETH, stablecoins
Aave Prime	46,835,039	85 M	3.99 %	wstETH, WETH
Aave Horizon	30,443,564	50 M	3.30 %	tokenized Treasuries and credit funds

Horizon is Aave's market for institutions: only whitelisted holders can supply its real-world-asset tokens, such as Superstate's USCC and USTB and Janus Henderson's JAAA, and borrow against them, while anyone can supply the stablecoins they borrow. Aave doesn't record which collateral backs which loan: an account's collateral backs everything it borrows. So the vaults here carry the GHO debt, and each loan holds more collateral than that.

Other chains' Aave markets lend GHO too, but that GHO is bridged and supplied, not minted there. On October 1, 2026 about 18.7 M was borrowed on Plasma and 18.3 M on Monad, at around 4.5 %.

The GHO Stability Modules

A GSM swaps a stablecoin for GHO at a fixed one for one, within an exposure cap. Since the RemoteGSM upgrade, proposed in March 2026, each network has one GHO reserve, minted in advance by a single facilitator, that its GSMs draw from and refill. The stablecoins they take in are wrapped as Aave aTokens, so they earn Aave's supply rate for the DAO. Going in is free; coming out costs 0.10 % for USDT and USDT0 and 0.15 % for USDC on Ethereum.

On October 1, 2026 the Ethereum USDT GSM held 22.4 M USDT, down from 53.2 M on August 13, and the USDC GSM was empty. Plasma's USDT0 GSM held 40.7 M. New GSMs for USDC on Arbitrum and Monad had 50 M GHO each in reserve and almost nothing swapped. When GHO trades below a dollar, buying it and selling it to a GSM for USDT earns the gap, as long as the GSM has USDT left.

Savings: sGHO

sGHO, in its current form since spring 2026, is GHO's savings token: an ERC-4626 vault whose interest accrues on-chain, where its predecessor paid separately claimed rewards. It pays the Aave Savings Rate, set by the GHO stewards and funded from the DAO's treasury: 4.25 % at first, 4.50 % since August 2026. Deposits can't be slashed and there's no cooldown on withdrawals. On October 1, 2026 sGHO held 169.7 M GHO, against a cap of 400 M. Live mode reads its rate from the contract every minute. Umbrella's stkGHO (2.1 M) is different: it can be cut to cover bad debt in Aave Core. It, and the 30.9 M still in the older staked GHO, are counted with the rest of Ethereum here.

Liquidations

Each Aave account has a health factor: its collateral, each asset weighted by its liquidation threshold (83 % for WETH on Core), divided by its debt. Below 1, anyone can call the pool's liquidation function: they repay part of the debt in GHO and receive the same value of collateral plus a bonus, 5 % for WETH, 6 % for wstETH and 7 % for weETH. Up to half the debt can be repaid at once, or all of it when the health factor is below 0.95 or the debt or collateral involved is worth less than $2,000. Prices come from Chainlink.

There are no auctions and no keepers appointed by Aave: liquidators are bots competing for the bonus. If a liquidation leaves debt with no collateral behind it, Aave records it as a deficit, which Umbrella's stakers cover for Core's main assets, GHO among them. No GHO loan on Ethereum was liquidated in the 33 hours before October 1, 2026.

Other chains

GHO moves between chains over Chainlink CCIP. On Ethereum its token pool locks GHO in an escrow; on every other chain the token pool mints and burns it, and is a facilitator there with a 200 M bucket. On October 1, 2026 GHO existed on Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Gnosis, Ink, Mantle, Monad, Plasma and X Layer, 126.3 M in all, most of it the GSM reserves on Monad and Arbitrum. A transfer on each is settled by that chain, and on Avalanche by its validators; the escrow on Ethereum is what stands behind each copy.

What live mode shows, and what the animation simplifies

Live mode reads GHO's supply on Ethereum and nine other chains, straight from public nodes, less the reserves, unborrowed pool GHO and escrow described above. It reads every Ethereum block's GHO transfers, which gives the transfer rate. GHO leaving an Aave pool, the GHO reserve or a GSM is counted as minted, because that's when it reaches someone, and GHO going back as burned; the feed names which. The gauge shows each GHO market's debt, rate and cap from Aave's API, the GSMs' stablecoins from the chain, and liquidations of GHO loans from the three Aave pools. The animation draws each kind of backing as one box, sizes the loans by their debt, clears the whole loan in one liquidation, and the step-by-step numbers are illustrative, about a third of the real system. Read Aave's GHO docs and the GHO stewards' August 2026 update for the details.