We are proud to share that $1BN loans have been issued on Maple. Achieved in just 10 months, this is a key milestone for Maple, our partners, the DeFi industry and digital economy at large. Maple’s debt-capital market infrastructure has enabled credit experts to launch and grow healthy lending businesses. This is the catalyst to Maple’s growth and here we deep dive into the liquidity pools on Maple and share what’s next.

The pool delegate model

Maple expands the digital economy by providing the tooling for credit-experts to build lending businesses, which in turn facilitates undercollateralized lending for institutional borrowers and income opportunities for lenders. Undercollateralized lending is the first-choice and most capital-efficient solution for capital-intensive market-makers in the space.

Maple’s tooling and smart contract kit includes everything CeFi and DeFi teams need to run a sophisticated global lending business, including loan origination, loan management and real-time performance reporting. Pool Delegates, Celsius, Maven 11, BlockTower and Orthogonal Trading, combine these tools with their underwriting expertise and diligence, starting loans small and increasing them in size as borrower credit history and relationships deepen.

The journey to $1BN

Maple launched in May 2021 with one pool operated by Orthogonal Trading, the pool opened at $17M, and has since issued $407M in loans. The Orthogonal team brings experience in portfolio and risk management, auditing, quantitative trading, and blockchain system development from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, B2C2 and more.

Orthogonal Trading now operates two pools on the platform. The second saw DeFi’s first syndicated loan, for Alameda Research. Liquidity providers to this pool must be non-US persons, and pass through KYC-AML procedures and loans are issued to Alameda in tranches. The third tranche issued a record-breaking $47.25M, which was beaten overnight with the fourth tranche, where $77.77M was lent in a single loan. Bringing the total loans to $199M, with Alameda hungry for $1BN by year-end.

Maven 11, an Amsterdam-founded blockchain and crypto asset investment firm, joined Maple in July 2021, with a strategy to lend USDC to borrowers with capital intensive businesses and a strong balance sheet. Their USDC denominated pool has grown 15x and originated $333M in loans. Earlier in the month, the all-star team launched their second pool to meet customer demand and market conditions. Same strategy and borrower cross-over, but this time offering wETH.

In November, we launched DeFi’s first permissioned pool with BlockTower, marking the beginning of regulated entities facilitating on-chain lending on Maple. As a Pool Delegate, BlockTower have two roles; onboard accredited non-US persons that pass through KYC-AML procedures as liquidity providers, and assess the creditworthiness of borrowers, issue and underwrite loans, and manage interest and principal payments.

February welcomed Celsius as the first CeFi Pool Delegate to build a business on Maple’s DeFi rails. The pool puts Celsius’ treasury to work, loaning wETH to crypto blue-chips they and Maple already have a relationship with. The team plans to scale the number of borrowers and loans issued in the coming year. Borrowers, Wintermute and Amber will use the capital to fund business operations and growth as well as benefit from the efficiency of not needing to lock up much-needed capital to secure the loans.

Borrowers on Maple

Participants are known, reputable market makers and market neutral funds. The firms represent a dominant share of the crypto’s market liquidity and have AUM ranging from ~$35M to ~$20B.

Approximately 25 borrowers use capital to fund business operations and growth and benefit from the efficiency of not needing to lock up much-needed capital to secure the loans.

“The Maple lending platform helped our business to acquire the resources needed for growth, and to continue building the future of digital assets.” — Amber Group

“Maple is powering the future of DeFi by creating a platform where leading market makers like Wintermute have access to growth capital that would not have been available in traditional markets.” — Wintermute

What’s coming next?

We are a technology platform for credit experts to run lending businesses and are in constant consultation with regulated and listed firms. We are witnessing increasing demand to create credit products for miners, lending pools with real-world assets, and provide short-term and flexible loans. Maple is industry agnostic, and long-term Maple’s infrastructure and partners will scale and move to provide credit across all industries, tech, SaaS, even space exploration. Through building a robust, versatile and intuitive decentralized lending infrastructure that meets market demands, we expand our total addressable market and become the dominant institutional crypto-capital network.

In the near term, Maple will move to be multi-chain, and launch on Solana. The acquisition of the Avari protocol means we will expand to Solana in the coming weeks, and begin to welcome high-quality players from the Solana ecosystem such as DAOs, protocols and institutional investors. With this move we are aiming to reach $2 billion in TVL by June this year and $5 billion by the end of the year.

Interested in becoming a Pool Delegate? Visit our GitBook to find out more.

You can learn more about borrowing on Maple here.