Maple finance quietly becomes one of the most important bridges between decentralized finance (DEFI) and traditional finance.
Co-founded by Sidney Powell in 2021, the institutional cryptography loan platform facilitated more than $ 5 billion in loans and is increasingly positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for the Tokenized Private Credit-A Tradfi sector quickly adopts.
After a few turbulent years for the Credit Credit markets, Maple organized an impressive return. In 2024, its total locked value increased by more than 580%, driven by new products such as syrupusdc – a return offer without authorization blocked to American users but aimed at the Global DEFI protocols. His TV that year increased from around $ 44 million to more than $ 300 million. Sidney Powell is a speaker at the top of Open Money Consensus 2025 on May 14.
Powell points to Maple guardian integrations, the native support of the BTC and the low risk of compensation as key advantages for institutions looking for yield in a post-TFX landscape.
At the same time, Maple aligned his governance and incentives around a single token, syrup, migrating far from the old NPL model. Without holders of actions behind the scenes, Powell maintains that syrup is the only necessary capital structure – a design that avoids poorly aligned incentives that tormented other token projects.
Before the 2025 consensus, Maple extends its imprint in Asia and Latin America, launching a token of jealous of Bitcoin liquid and betting large on the rise of the institutional definition.
Powell, an Australian Entrepreneur Fintech who began his career in traditional finance at the National Australia Bank in Melbourne, sat with Coindesk to talk about the next step. This Q&R was published by clarity and patented.
Coindesk: Maple growth in 2024 was impressive. What motivates him and how do you position the maple differently from other DEFI lenders?
Powell:: Much of the growth of Q2 has come from our ability to accept a wider range of guarantees – for example, soil, not just BTC. This opened us for more types of tailor -made loans for our institutional borrowers who accepted soil as guaranteed instead of simply BTC and ETH.
This gave us a wider set of customers. But from Q3, the real driver was the launch of Syrupusdc – a version without authorization of the product intended for DEFI, although blocked in the United States, it offers the same yield of institutional loans under the hood. We have also trained partnerships with Pendle, Morpho and Sky.
Having this DEFI access point, the ability of the protocols to integrate us, was a very good source of growth. The other thing is: borrowers love our product. They can publish the native BTC without intelligent contracts and face less risk of compensation.
Because we are really dealing with institutions only institutions, we have always offered a higher return, which attracts more capital over time.
The introduction of the syrup token was absolutely essential in the development of maple. What is the role of the token in the ecosystem and how does it improve it?
The syrup connects governance – it is the only token in the maple ecosystem. Last year, we migrated from the old NPL token to syrup, which now manages coordination and governance. What is unique is that we have no equity; There is only the token, and I think that prevents an inherent conflict of interest.
It removes the conflicts of interest that you see when the holders of actions extract all the value and the token is treated as a reflection afterwards. With us, it’s just the token. About 90% of it is already circulating, and it has existed for over four years.
All interests are aligned; This is only the token, and there is no equity to connect the ecosystem. This long -term alignment of interest helps maintain the connected ecosystem.
Earlier this year – and more recently – volatility has been extreme. In early February, Maple published an article where he said he had succeeded in undergoing one of the largest liquidation events with zero liquidations on his protocol. What lessons did you get from this experience and how did you achieve this?
First of all, these events always seem to occur on Sunday evening! February was no different, because weren’t August and April from last year. But what saved us was the subscription – all our customers have a guarantee position and have done so on all the volatility periods we have had. In the past 18 months, we have had only one partial liquidation, which shows the importance of subscription of customers to ensure that they can always display more guarantee.
This underlines how cautious we are with the loan / value ratios and the types of guarantees that we accept. If we accept something very non -liquid, during periods of volatility, there are more risks for us, our lenders and capital providers.
After each volatility event, we do a post-mortem to refine our process. It has become even more important because we went from $ 150 million to $ 800 million of total locked value – we must be much more composed and effective.
Maple develops in the regions of Asia-Pacific and Latin America. What opportunities and challenges do you plan on these markets?In Asia, everything takes place on relationships, so we hired a comic book in Hong Kong to help build this. We have the performance of loans against bitcoin and we have a Bitcoin yield product, which, I think, will be very important to crack Asia.
There is such a large base of individuals and high -sharpness families who hold BTC, so our Bitcoin yield and loan products are a good adjustment.
In Latin America, it is more a retail market. The penetration of the syrupusdc counts more there – applications like lemon introduce customer deposits and use DEFI on the backend. Our retail products and partnerships will be essential to crack this region. There is also a strong penetration of Bitcoin there, so BTC products will also be really good.
While we are impatiently awaiting consensus, what key themes and developments do you see in the world defined in the near future, and how is maple position to treat them?
I think that the active ingredients will continue to be a persistent theme, because it is very attractive for institutions, especially those who enter crypto for the first time. We see more tradfi players like Cantor Fitzgerald getting involved in loans supported by Crypto.
Stablecoins and loans are proven models that institutions include and have been revealed. They will continue to attract the attention of institutions that are perhaps professional asset managers, and their first steps in space will be a key thing. Bitcoin is often their entry point – they buy it first, then they want to borrow against him or generate a yield.
This is why we focus on Bitcoin DEFI and the launch of a Bitcoin liquid token. This will allow people to use BTC as a guarantee that really earns a return – something that has been missing so far.
