Maple Finance is quietly becoming one of the most important bridges between decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance.

Co-founded by Sidney Powell in 2021, the institutional crypto lending platform has facilitated over $5 billion in loans and is increasingly positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for tokenized private credit — a sector TradFi is rapidly embracing.

After a turbulent few years for crypto credit markets, Maple has staged an impressive comeback. In 2024, its total value locked surged over 580%, driven by new products like SyrupUSDC — a permissionless yield offering blocked to U.S. users but aimed at global DeFi protocols. Its TVL that year went from around $44 million to over $300 million.Sidney Powell is a speaker at the Consensus 2025 Open Money Summit on May 14.

Powell points to Maple’s custodian integrations, native BTC support, and low counterparty risk as key advantages for institutions seeking yield in a post-FTX landscape.

At the same time, Maple has aligned its governance and incentives around a single token, SYRUP, migrating away from the older NPL model. With no equity holders behind the scenes, Powell argues that SYRUP is the only capital structure needed — a design that sidesteps the misaligned incentives that have plagued other token projects.

Ahead of Consensus 2025, Maple is expanding its footprint in Asia and Latin America, launching a bitcoin liquid staking token, and betting big on the continued rise of institutional DeFi.

Powell, an Australian fintech entrepreneur who started his career in traditional finance at National Australia Bank in Melbourne, sat down with CoinDesk to talk about what’s next. This Q&A was edited for clarity and brevity.

CoinDesk: Maple’s growth in 2024 has been impressive. What’s driving it, and how are you positioning Maple differently from other DeFi lenders?

Powell: A lot of the growth in Q2 came from our ability to accept a wider range of collateral — for example, SOL, not just BTC. That opened us up for more bespoke types of loans for our institutional borrowers who accepted SOL as collateral instead of just BTC and ETH.

That gave us a broader set of customers. But from Q3 onward, the real driver was the launch of SyrupUSDC — a permissionless version of the product geared towards DeFi, though blocked in the U.S., it offers the same yield from institutional loans under the hood. We also formed partnerships with Pendle, Morpho, and Sky.

Having that DeFi access point, the ability for protocols to integrate us, was a really good source of growth. The other thing is: borrowers like our product. They can post native BTC without smart contracts and face less counterparty risk.

Because we’re only really dealing with institutions, we’ve consistently offered a higher yield, which attracts more capital over time.

The introduction of the SYRUP token was absolutely pivotal in the development of Maple. What’s the token’s role within the ecosystem, and how does it enhance it?

SYRUP ties together governance — it’s the only token in the Maple ecosystem. Last year, we migrated from the old NPL token to SYRUP, which now handles coordination and governance. What’s 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 you see when equity holders extract all the value and the token is treated like an afterthought. With us, it’s only the token. About 90% of it is already circulating, and it’s been around for over four years.

All of the interests are aligned; it’s only the token, and there’s no equity to connect the ecosystem. That long-term alignment of interests helps keep the ecosystem connected.

Earlier this year — and more recently — volatility has been extreme. In early February, Maple published a post where it said it managed to endure one of the largest liquidation events with zero liquidations on its protocol. What lessons did you get from this experience, and how did you achieve this?

First off, these events always seem to happen on Sunday nights! February was no different, as weren’t August and April of last year. But what saved us is underwriting — all of our clients consistently post collateral and have done so over all of the periods of volatility we’ve had. Over the past 18 months, we've only had one partial liquidation, which shows the importance of underwriting clients to make sure they can always post more collateral.

That highlights how careful we are with loan-to-value ratios and the kinds of collateral we accept. If we accept something very illiquid, in times of volatility there’s more risk to us, our lenders, and capital providers.

After every volatility event, we do a post-mortem to refine our process. That’s become even more important as we’ve grown from $150 million to $800 million in total value locked — we have to be much more dialed in and efficient.

Maple is expanding to the Asia Pacific and Latin America regions. What opportunities and challenges do you foresee in these markets?In Asia, everything runs on relationships, so we hired a BD person in Hong Kong to help build that up. We have yield from lending against bitcoin and we have a bitcoin yield product, which I think is going to be very important in cracking Asia.

There’s such a large base of high-net-worth individuals and family offices holding BTC, so our bitcoin yield and lending products are a good fit.

In Latin America, it’s more of a retail-driven market. SyrupUSDC penetration matters more there — apps like Lemon bring in customer deposits and use DeFi on the backend. Our retail-facing products and partnerships will be key to cracking that region. There’s also a big penetration of bitcoin there, so BTC yield products will also be really good.

As we look forward to Consensus, what key themes and developments do you see in the DeFi world in the near future, and how is Maple positioning itself to deal with them?

I think reward assets are going to continue to be a persistent theme because it’s very appealing to institutions, especially those coming into crypto for the first time. We’re seeing more TradFi players like Cantor Fitzgerald getting involved in crypto-backed lending. 

Stablecoins and lending are proven models that institutions understand and have proven out. They are going to continue to draw the attention of institutions who are perhaps professional asset managers, and their first steps into the space will be a key thing. Bitcoin is often their entry point — first they buy it, then they want to borrow against it or generate yield.

That’s why we’re focused on Bitcoin DeFi and launching a bitcoin liquid staking token. It’ll let people use BTC as collateral that actually earns yield — something that’s been missing until now.

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