# Tracking Aave Positions: Supply, Debt, Health > Aave supplies and borrows are separate tokens with independent balances. How to net them into a real position, and why health factor belongs in risk data. - **URL:** https://octav.fi/blog/tracking-aave-positions - **Published:** 2026-04-16 - **Author:** Octav Team — Portfolio Intelligence for Digital Assets - **Topic:** Protocols - **Tags:** aave, lending, defi - **Source:** Octav, Practical guides on crypto NAV reporting, multi-chain portfolio management and digital asset APIs, from the team behind Octav. --- Aave is the easiest DeFi position to track and still the one most often reported wrong — because a lending position is two balances, and reporting either one alone gives a number that is confidently incorrect. ## What sits in the wallet | Action | Token you receive | Behaviour | | --- | --- | --- | | Supply an asset | An `aToken` (e.g. `aUSDC`) | Balance grows as interest accrues | | Borrow an asset | A variable debt token | Balance grows as interest accrues | Both are interest-bearing and both increase over time. The critical difference is the sign: the supply token is an asset, the debt token is a **liability**. An API that enumerates token balances and sums them will happily add the debt token to your net worth as a positive number. That does not produce a slightly inflated portfolio — it inverts the meaning of a leveraged position. ## Netting the position The portfolio value of an Aave position is: ``` net position = Σ (aToken balance × price) − Σ (debt token balance × price) ``` A wallet that supplied $1M of ETH and borrowed $400k of USDC holds a $600k net position — not $1.4M, and not $1M. This matters most for the strategy that is most common: looped collateral. A wallet running a leverage loop may hold several million in `aTokens` against nearly as much debt, for a net position that is a fraction of either leg. Report the supply side alone and you overstate the fund by multiples. ## The health factor is not optional Value tells you what the position is worth. Health factor tells you whether it still exists tomorrow. | Field | Why it belongs in your data | | --- | --- | | Health factor | Below 1, the position is liquidatable | | Liquidation threshold | The level at which that happens per asset | | E-Mode category | Changes the thresholds materially | | Borrow APY vs supply APY | Determines whether the loop is profitable | For a fund, a portfolio system that reports a leveraged Aave position's value without its health factor has answered the accounting question and ignored the risk one. Both are needed — see [Tracking Hyperliquid Perps](/hyperliquid-perps-portfolio-tracking) for the same distinction applied to derivatives. ## Multi-chain and multi-version Aave runs across many chains and more than one protocol version, and the same market exists in several places. A wallet with the same strategy on Ethereum, Base and Arbitrum has three distinct positions to enumerate, each with its own contract addresses. This is the combinatorial problem described in [Tracking DeFi Positions Across Multiple Chains](/track-defi-positions-multichain): the work is protocols × chains × versions, not the sum of any one of them. ## Why Aave is the benchmark's control In [our nine-provider benchmark](/crypto-portfolio-api-benchmark), a clean single-protocol Aave wallet reconciles across every EVM API to **within 0.2%**. That is the point of including it: it proves the huge divergences elsewhere are coverage gaps, not price-feed disagreements. If a provider cannot get an Aave wallet right, the problem is fundamental. If it gets Aave right and still disagrees by 10× on a whale, the difference is entirely about which sectors it can decode. ## Checking your provider Query an address with an open Aave borrow and check three things: - Is the debt reported at all, or only the supply? - Is the debt **negative** in the portfolio total? - Is the health factor available anywhere in the response? A provider that answers "supply only" is not tracking a lending position. It is tracking half of one.