GHO's 61% Supply Drop Is an Accounting Change, Not a Redemption Wave

Aave's stablecoin GHO didn't lose 61% of its supply in a week. The plunge in DefiLlama's reported circulating figure — from $699 million on Nov. 6 to roughly $270 million on Nov. 13 — reflects a methodology change the analytics platform merged on Nov. 12, not mass redemptions by holders.

An independent read of the Ethereum token contract through Etherscan still returns 699 million GHO in total issuance. That figure includes idle inventory sitting in protocol contracts, which the new DefiLlama calculation excludes.

What did DefiLlama actually change?

Previously, DefiLlama counted GHO's full Ethereum token supply. The updated adapter subtracts several categories of tokens that were minted but never reached users:

• Unused GHO held in reserves on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Monad and Plasma
• Eligible unborrowed inventory created by direct minters in Aave's Core market
• The same idle inventory in Aave's Prime/Lido and Horizon markets

The adapter's code preserves GHO deposited by ordinary users in the circulating figure. When users borrow, the calculation attributes that borrowing to the direct minter's inventory first and subtracts only the eligible idle remainder. Unused permission to mint additional tokens — a cap, not a balance — doesn't factor into the deduction.

The contributor who proposed the change flagged the visual consequence in advance, warning that without recalculating historical observations the chart would show a roughly $420 million drop the moment the update went live. The fetched series confirms that: it still displays exactly $699 million for every daily observation from Oct. 15 through Nov. 12, then the lower reading on Nov. 13. The old snapshots and the new one use two different counting methods, so the series isn't a like-for-like measure of weekly outflows.

Daily snapshots are taken at midnight UTC and expressed in nominal dollar-pegged supply, which means the chart straddles two methodologies rather than tracking a single continuous metric.

Why does the distinction matter for users?

For borrowers and savers, the difference between minted-but-idle tokens and tokens circulating with users is operational, not cosmetic. Removing idle inventory from a data feed doesn't withdraw liquidity, and it doesn't change any loan's terms.

Aavescan showed a 4.50% borrowing APR for GHO on Ethereum V3 when checked, and the same rate appears in its Nov. 7–13 daily snapshots. Borrowing costs moved on nothing here.

For holders of savings GHO, or sGHO, redemption and conversion remain two separate actions. Aave's documentation says the savings vault redeems shares into GHO without a cooldown. Exchanging that GHO for another stablecoin is a separate transaction, and the lower circulating-supply count measures nothing about the liquidity available for that exit.

Anyone benchmarking GHO's supply week over week needs both endpoints computed under the revised method. The old $699 million baseline and the new $270 million reading can't establish a comparable weekly change — the numbers describe different things.

What should market participants watch next?

Watch whether DefiLlama recalculates its historical GHO series under the new methodology, and whether other data aggregators adopt the same exclusion of direct-minter inventory. Until the baseline is restated, any weekly supply comparison built on the current chart mixes two definitions and will overstate outflows by roughly $420 million.