coindesk.com
BTCS, a Nasdaq-listed company that holds ether as its main asset, has been selling $ETH for less than it paid to keep a $64 million loan on the lending platform Aave from getting too close to liquidation.
The company said in a quarterly filing Thursday that it owed about $64.1 million on Aave as of Nov. 9, including accrued interest. The debt was backed by 46,676 $ETH worth $99.3 million at the company’s stated ether price of $2,127, or collateral worth about 155% of what it owed.
“Sales of $ETH were executed at prices below their original cost basis as part of the Company’s active management of collateral levels and health factors associated with DeFi borrowing arrangements,” the company said.
BTCS didn’t say how much ether it sold for that purpose or how much of its realized losses came from those sales.
Where the line sits
Aave has no loan officer to call a borrower. The protocol constantly and automatically scores each loan with a “health factor” that compares the borrower’s collateral, adjusted for how much of it Aave lets count, against the debt. If the score drops below 1, the protocol can sell part of the collateral automatically to pay down the loan.
BTCS says Aave generally counts about 80% of its $ETH. As of the Nov. 9 numbers, that gives the loan a health factor of roughly 1.24 and puts the liquidation line near $1,717 per ether, according to CoinDesk calculations, assuming the debt and collateral don’t change.
Ether traded around $1,950 on Friday, about 12% above that line and well below the $2,127 in BTCS’s snapshot. The company’s position may have changed since Nov. 9.
There isn’t much cash to fall back on either. BTCS had about $463,000 in cash at the end of September, and it said a “significant majority” of its digital assets were deployed on Aave as collateral, so those coins are locked up while the debt is outstanding.
From $320,000 to $64 million
The borrowing has grown fast. BTCS had just $320,000 borrowed against 446 $ETH when it first disclosed its Aave position in April 2025.
By August 2026, the debt had reached $53 million against more than 46,500 $ETH. Since the start of 2025, it has borrowed about $152.4 million in stablecoins, mainly Tether’s USDT and Aave’s own dollar token GHO, and repaid about $89.4 million.
The board allows new Aave borrowing up to a 50% loan-to-value ratio, meaning BTCS can borrow at most half of what its collateral is worth.
