Maple Finance quietly becomes one of the most important bridges between Decentralized Finance (DEFI) and traditional finances.
Co-founded by Sidney Powell in 2021, facilitated the institutional lending platform in Crypto more than $ 5 billion In loans and more self -positioning as a layer of infrastructure for tokenized private credit – a tradfi sector quickly embraces.
After a chaotic several years for crypto credit markets, Maple presented a wonderful return. In 2024, its total amount locked up to more than 580%, driven by new products such as syrupusdc -an unauthorized harvest that offers US users but aims at global defi protocols. Its TVL this year came from about $ 44 million to over $ 300 million.Sidney Powell was a speaker at the Consensus 2025 Open Money Summit on May 14.
Powell points to maple custodian integration, native BTC support, and low-risk risk as the main benefit for institutions seeking harvest in a post-FETX landscape.
At the same time, Maple aligns management and incentives around a single token, syrup, moving away from the older NPL model. Without equity holders behind the scenes, Powell said syrup was the only capital structure needed – a design that complies with the false incentives that other token projects have occurred.
Leading to Consensus 2025Maple expands its footprints in Asia and Latin America, launching a token of Bitcoin Liquid staking, and has a significant estimate of the ever -increasing institutional defi.
Powell, an Australian Fintech businessman who started his career in traditional finances at the National Australia Bank in Melbourne, sat with CoinDesk to talk next. This Q&A is edited for clarity and sadness.
CoinDesk: Maple’s growth in 2024 became amazing. What is driving it, and how are you different from positioning maple from other lenders?
Powell: A lot of growth in Q2 derives from our ability to receive a wider collateral range – for example, Sol, not just BTC. It opened to us for more bespoke types of loans for our institution’s debtors who accepted Sol as collateral instead of BTC and ETH only.
That gave us a wider range of customers. But from the Q3 forward, the real driver is the launch of the syrupusdc – an unauthorized version of the product dedicated to the DeFI, even if blocked in the US, it offers the same harvest from institutional loans under the hood. We also developed a partnership with Pendle, Morpho, and Sky.
Having that DeFi access point, the ability for protocols to include us, is a great source of growth. The other thing is: lenders like our product. They can post folk BTCs without smart contracts and at least at the risk of counterparts.
Because we really get in touch with institutions, we always offer a higher yield, which attracts more capital over time.
The introduction of the syrup token is absolutely important in the formation of maple. What is the role of the token within the ecosystem, and how can it be enhanced?
Syrup ties come together in management – this is the only token in the maple ecosystem. Last year, we moved from the old NPL to token to syrup, which is now holding coordination and management. What is unique is that we have no equity; There is only the token, and I think it prevents a natural conflict of interest.
It removes conflicts of interest you see when equity holders take all the amount and the token is treated like a thought. To us, this is the only token. Almost 90% of them are moving, and for more than four years.
All interests are aligned; This is just the token, and there is no equity to connect the ecosystem. The long -term alignment of interests helps keep the ecosystem connecting.
Earlier this year – and more recently – volatility has been intense. In early February, Maple published a post in which he said it managed to endure one of the biggest extermination events with zero avoiding its protocol. What lessons did you get from this experience, and how did you achieve them?
First, these events Always It looks like it will happen on Sunday night! February is no different, as it wasn’t August and April last year. But the one that saved us was underwriting -all of our clients kept posting collateral and did it all the time of volatility we had. Over the past 18 months, we have only a slight extermination, which shows the importance of writing clients to make sure they can always post more collateral.
Featuring how much we are careful with the ratios of value and the types of collateral we accept. If we accept something that is very unhealthy, in times of volatility there is a greater danger to us, our lenders, and capital providers.
After each event of volatility, we created a post-mortem to refine our process. That became more important because we grew up from $ 150 million to $ 800 million in the total amount locked -we had to be more dial and efficient.
Maple expands in the regions of Asia Pacific and Latin America. What opportunities and challenges have you learned in these markets?In Asia, everyone runs into relationships, so we rent a BD person in Hong Kong to help build that. We have the produce from lending against Bitcoin and we have a Bitcoin produce product, which I think will be very important in crackering Asia.
There is a huge basis of high -net individuals and family offices holding BTC, so our bitcoin products and lending are a great fit.
In Latin America, it’s more than a retail driven market. Syrupusdc penetration is more than that – apps like Lemon bring customer deposits and use a defi to backend. Our retail and partnership products will be key to cracking that region. There is also a huge penetration of Bitcoin there, so BTC yield products will be great too.
As we look forward to the consensus, what major themes and development do you see in the Defi world in the near future, and how is the maple positioning itself to deal with them?
I think the rewards ownership will continue to be an ongoing theme because it is very attractive -institutions, especially those who enter crypto at the forefront. We see more tradfi players like getting cantor fitzgerald involved in crypto supported by crypto.
Stablecoins and lending have proven models that are understood and proven by institutions. They will continue to draw the attention of institutions that are probably professional managers of ownership, and their first steps in space will be a key thing. Bitcoin is often their point of entry – they first buy it, so they want to borrow against it or produce produce.
That’s why we focus on Bitcoin Defi and launch a token of Bitcoin Liquid Staking. It will allow people to use BTC as a collateral that actually earns – something that is missing today.
