The financing of rings is becoming silent in one of the most important bridges between decentralized finances (DEFI) and traditional finances.
Co -founded by Sydney Powell in 2021, the institutional cryptography loans has provided more than $ 5 billion in loans and is increasingly positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for tokenized private credit: a traditional sector is rapidly hugging.
After a few turbulent years for cryptographic credit markets, Maple has organized an impressive return. In 2024, its total value blocked increased more than 580%, driven by new products such as Syrupusdc, an offer of non -blocked performance to US users, but aimed at the Global Defi protocols. Its TVL that year went from around $ 44 million to more than $ 300 million. Sidney Powell is a speaker at the Money Open Consensus 2025 summit on May 14.
Powell points out Maple’s custodian integrations, BTC’s native support and the low risk of counterpart as key advantages for institutions seeking performance in a Panorama after FTX.
At the same time, Maple has aligned his governance and incentives around a single file, syrup, migrating away from the previous NPL model. Without capital shareholders behind the scene, Powell argues that syrup is the only necessary capital structure: a design that avoids misaligned incentives that have affected other tokens projects.
Before consensus 2025, Maple is expanding its footprint in Asia and Latin America, launching a Bitcoin liquid commitment and betting large in the continuous increase of institutional defi.
Powell, an Australian Fintech businessman who began his career in traditional finance at the National Bank of Australia in Melbourne, sat down with Coindesk to talk about what follows. This question and answer session was edited by clarity and brevity.
COINDESK: Maple’s growth in 2024 has been impressive. What is promoting and how is Maple differently from other lenders defi?
Powell: Much of the growth in Q2 came from our ability to accept a broader range of guarantees, for example, Sol, not just BTC. That opened us for more types of custom loans for our institutional borrowers who accepted Sol as a guarantee instead of BTC and ETH.
That gave us a broader set of customers. But from the third quarter onwards, the true controller was the launch of Syrupusdc, a version without permission from the product directed towards Defi, although blocked in the US. UU., It offers the same performance of institutional loans under the hood. We also form associations with Pendle, Morpho and Sky.
Having that access point defi, the ability of protocols to integrate was a very good source of growth. The other thing is: borrowers like our product. They can publish native BTC without intelligent contracts and face less risk of counterpart.
Because we are only dealing with institutions, we have constantly offered a higher performance, which attracts more capital over time.
The introduction of the syrup file was absolutely fundamental in the development of the Arce. What is the role of Token inside the ecosystem and how does it improve it?
The syrup joins governance: it is the only card in the Arce ecosystem. Last year, we emigrate from the ancient token from NPL to syrup, which now handles coordination and governance. The only thing is that we have no equity; There is only the Token, and I think it avoids an inherent conflict of interest.
Eliminates the conflicts of interest you see when capital shareholders extract all value and token is treated as a late occurrence. With us, it’s just the Token. About 90% is already circulating, and has existed for more than four years.
All interests are aligned; It is only the Token, and there is no capital 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. At the beginning of February, Maple published a publication in which he said he managed to endure one of the largest liquidation events with zero liquidations in his protocol. What lessons did you get from this experience and how did you achieve this?
First, these events always It seems to happen on Sunday nights! February was no different, as were not August and April last year. But what saved us is to subscribe: all our clients constantly publish collateral and have done so during all the volatility periods we have had. In the last 18 months, we have only had a partial liquidation, which shows the importance of subscribing customers to ensure that they can always publish more guarantees.
That highlights how careful we are with value loan relations and the types of guarantees that we accept. If we accept something very illegid, in times of volatility there is more risk for us, our lenders and capital suppliers.
After each volatility event, we make an autopsy to refine our process. That has become even more important since we have grown from $ 150 million to $ 800 million in total value blocked: we have to be much more marked and efficient.
The Arce is expanding to the regions of Asia Pacific and Latin America. What opportunities and preve challenges in these markets?In Asia, everything works with relationships, so we hire a BD person in Hong Kong to help build that. We have a loan performance against Bitcoin and we have a Bitcoin performance product, which I think will be very important to crack Asia.
There is such a large base of high -level network individuals and family offices that have BTC, so our Bitcoin performance and loan products are a good option.
In Latin America, it is more a market driven by retail trade. Syrupusdc Penetration matters more there: applications like lemon bring customer deposits and use defi in the backend. Our products and retail guidance associations will be key to deciphering that region. There is also a great Bitcoin penetration there, so BTC’s performance products will also be really good.
As we expect consensus, what key topics and developments do you see in the world of Defi in the near future and how Maple is positioned to deal with them?
I believe that reward assets will continue to be a persistent issue because it is very attractive to institutions, especially those that enter cryptography for the first time. We are seeing more tradfi players as Cantor Fitzgerald getting involved in loans with cryptographic support.
The stable and loans are proven models that institutions understand and have demonstrated. They will continue to call the attention of the institutions that may be administrators of professional assets, and their first steps in space will be a key. Bitcoin is often their entry point: they first buy it, then they want to borrow or generate performance.
That is why we are focused on Bitcoin Defi and the launch of a Bitcoin Liquid stagnation tab. It will allow people to use BTC as a guarantee that the performance is actually won, something that has lacked so far.
