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$AAVE's incredible growth is an excellent display of supply/demand and security provided by $LINK.

Demand: is increasing with use of DeFi, total value locked in aave, and better yield and trust in DeFi than CeFI.

The token can act as collateral, governance and income

Aave tokens holders can stake within the Safety Module, it acts as a mitigation tool incase of a shortfall event, maintaining protocol integrity.

As an incentive, stakers receive incentives (6.25% paid in AAVE). There is a 10 day cooldown period before you can unstake tokens.

So as you can imagine long term turbo autists of $AAVE are accumulating to stake, whilst accumulating from staking. Very few sellers. Very little open market supply.

If there was a huge increase in price like today, stakers can't sell for 10 days from unstaking

So we're seeing buyers pay increasing price for Aave tokens. But why?

These tokens can act as governance, incentives can be changed, protocol fees, adding new assets, increasing loan to value of assets etc etc.

They can earn incentives through staking

If you think a crypto is going up vs USD you could deposit crypto, get a stablecoin loan against this, buy $LINK $AAVE or other assets and sell them to repay your loans and profit the difference in fiat or keep the remainder

(there are risks of liquidation etc, risks involved)

This is an example of great tokenomics.

Currently with $LINK there is few open market supply retainers.

you can use $LINK as collateral or Liquidity pool in Bancor $BNT or borrow to a centralised exchanges such as Celcius (risks). Once staking goes live, this changes.