Why Smart Investors Are Rushing Into This New Crypto Lending Wave Right Now

Transcript

Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Before we get started, a quick reminder. Nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is forformational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold assets discussed in the show. For more disclosures, visit unchaincrypto.com. Introducing Nexo, the premier digital wealth platform. Receive interest on your digital assets. Borrow against them without selling. Trade a variety of cryptocurrencies all in one platform now available in the US. Get started today at nexo.com/unchained.

Today's guest is Sid Powell, CEO and co-founder of Maple Finance. Welcome Sid. >> Hey Laura, thanks for having me on. Glad to be here. >> Yeah, excited to chat with you. So there's a number of DeFi lending protocols. Um Maple Finance is one of them. So just tell us what niche it occupies in this world. >> Yeah, in the DeFi lending space, Maple [clears throat] Maple kind of crosses two two interesting uh two interesting unique unique uh segments. So we do primarily institutional lending. So Maple does not lend to to retail users. uh our counterparties or our clients who borrow from us typically include asset managers, trading firms, exchanges,

family offices, um you know, other other trading other investment management firms. And the other uh the other thing that's unique about Maple is that we are almost a hybrid. So we source capital on chain. We have syrup USDC, syrup USDT, which uh folks can deposit to through smart contracts. Uh however when we do uh when we do loans with our institutional borrowers we sign offchain legal agreements with them and then we can also accept collateral into uh qualified custodians. So in this way we're a little bit of a hybrid between CFI lending which would use offchain agreements and custodians and DeFi lending where you take in the capital onchain and you record all of the loans

on chain. >> Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's this interesting hybrid. So describe a little bit more about the borrowers and lenders that use Maple. >> Yeah, it's a great question. So if you uh if you look who would come and use Maple, typically typically our clients, as I mentioned at the start, are going to include uh prime brokers. So folks who provide margin or lending or over-the-counter settlement uh to trading firms. It also includes asset managers who might be running yield strategies on chain for example or they might be running liquid token uh strategies. And then we have family officers who might hold a you know hold a significant amount of crypto but they

want to take out a loan to purchase real estate or make some other kind of investment. So the loan sizes that we do are typically anywhere from the smallest loan we do would be about $10 million and the largest we did was actually just before Christmas was a $500 million one. In each case, our clients will post Bitcoin or ETH or Salana or XRP, but some large capitalization crypto which serves as collateral for us and helps ensure that if they can't make their repayments that we still have protection so that us and our users are not going to take on, you know, take on any credit losses.

>> Okay. And then you also mentioned another key component of the Maple system which is your stable coin uh which there's a USDC and USDT version. Explain a little bit more about how that is used. >> Yeah, now this is interesting. So you've seen over 2025, Laura, we had a ton of new stable coins emerge. A lot of them are purporting to use, you know, different trading strategies or arbitrage to generate their yield. Uh what we decided to do was not necessarily to build a stable coin. We have built a call it a a yield product or or a savings product on top of two existing stable coins. So on top of USDC and USDT the yield in our in Maple's instance comes from the

overcolateralized loans to these institutional borrowers. So we originate a loan to them. They pay interest that then gets passed through as yield to holders of Sir USDC and Sir USDT. So, we launched both of these uh over a year ago. Since then, they've grown. They've been the fastest growing uh products that we have and they drove a lot of maples growth over 2025. And a lot of that, I think, has come from the composability. So, when you have syrup USDC or syrup USDT, you can use it as collateral in a Ave or Morpho uh or Oiler. You can uh put it into uh Pendle and hedge the price or rather

hedge the interest rates or you can use it crosschain on Salana or Arbitum or most recently base. Uh so I think that DeFi composability has been another unique point where Maple kind of is different to other CFI lenders and that drove a lot of our growth that we saw in 2025. Yeah, you briefly mentioned A. I saw that, you know, you um are now an issuer in a uh in a partnership that began in October, I think. And now you're the fastest growing issuer in A. So explain a little bit more about that partnership. Is is that the syrup USDC or USDT?

>> Yes, it's funny enough, it's actually both. So we uh entered into a partnership with Ave late last year in in um end of Q3 early Q4 and uh the way the partnership works is that syrup USDC and syrup USDT have been onboarded as collateral. So effectively the the the proposition to a user is you can put USDC into ser USDC mint it and then it's earning you at the moment it was uh moment it's closer to 5% but in the past it's been up around 6 or 7%. And either way the important point is that you can earn a higher yield than you can than the cost of borrowing on Ave. So it makes sense to post it as collateral to

Ave, borrow against it, mint more syrup USDC or USDT and then post it again to uh to Ave. So you're performing the looping trade. That's why the the yield out performance is the reason that it's grown so fast and and our partnership with Ave has actually taken place across multiple chains. So initially we did plasma with them and then we've since taken that partnership to arbitum to base and uh and we're looking at other chains at the moment but you know it's been a really good partnership for us really good partnership for them for a users what it means is that it brings up the utilization so people might have said well aren't you a competitor with a and the answer is no we actually work

quite well as partners because having sir USDC on there increases the utilization and the yield available for a user Yeah. And I also saw um yesterday Athena published a proposal to use Maple and Anchorage as potential direct lending partners for the backing assets of USDE. Explain how that would work and how that proposal came about. >> So uh we've, you know, we we have a great relationship with Athena. I've known Guy for a number of years. And the way that that proposal would work is that Athena would use uh syrup USDC or or syrup USCT or our permissioned uh Maple institutional pool as a source of

yield. So they would deploy some of their uh some of their assets uh that are backing USD to it and then it provides a yield and then the yield uh can serve or the yield can be passed on to their SUSD holders. So it's a partnership for them that represents diversification of their asset backing and their sources of yield. It gives them access to a non-correlated source of yield. So lending rates uh you know lending rates are are different to the basis trade. So it's a diversification of their strategies. Um and uh for us you know it's a great partnership.

Athena is is a blue chip within the space. We would love to work with them and ultimately we want uh you know we want to kind of fulfill this niche of being an institutional lender and providing curated yield opportunities to partners whether they are you know family officers or asset managers or uh blue chip defy protocols like Athena. >> Step into a new era of wealth. Discover Nexo, the premier digital wealth platform. Manage your crypto portfolio with confidence and control. Receive interest on your digital assets. Borrow against them without selling. Trade a wide range of cryptocurrencies all in one platform. Now available in the US with 30 days of exclusive privileges for

new clients. Experience Wealth Club Premiere. Access enhanced interest rates, reduced borrowing costs, and cryptocashback on swaps. Get started today at nexo.com/chained. Let's talk a little bit more about um you know the work that you do with um institutions. Last year we saw that Caner launched a Bitcoin lending facility that uses Maple um or or Maple sorry was one of the first to tap its credit facility. Um you also have a partnership with Bitwise. This also happened last year and that's for their institutional clients to gain access to onchain investment opportunities. tell us how those arrangements have been

going especially in what is kind of an interesting time in the market you know I don't know how that's affected like institutional interest in these types of products >> I think it's uh yeah it's definitely one of the one of the surprising things has been the resilience of the institutional interest in crypto I would say over you know periods of of kind of price weakness for lack of a better word uh now the caner relationship ship uh you know began a while back. We uh we were onboarded as their first uh you know their first uh bitcoinbacked borrower. So the way the relationship worked was Maple posted bitcoin to borrow dollars from caner and uh you

know and then they have since brought on other institutional borrowers like Falcon X. Uh but for us this was a huge watershed moment because obviously Caner has an incredible brand and presence and history within traditional finance and I think it really signaled the maturity of the space that a storied Wall Street player like Caner was willing to come in and do Bitcoin back lending and I think it signifies that you should expect to see more private credit players or investment banks start to move into this space over time and that it's an investable asset class. you know the the credit risk is good enough, the yield is good enough for institutions to want to earn yield from Bitcoin back lending. uh Bitwise similar similar case although

they are more of an asset manager uh and so they were allocating from one of their funds they liked the yields that were available on chain and they liked the transparency the liquidity available from deploying into yield opportunities on chain where I've seen institutional interest evolve uh over the past 12 months you know uh bitcoin has has been down or trading sideways altcoins have been trading But what we've seen is that the key difference this time versus 2022 is that there is no case of fraud or there's been nothing that's really dented the trust of institutions in the space. And so, you know, I was at Consensus Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago and what I

saw was continued interest from a lot of community banks, credit funds, other asset managers in exploring partnerships with players like us and and like other crypto lending firms in the space. And I don't expect that trend to slow down anytime soon. >> Yeah, it's interesting that you brought up the comparison to 2022 because I just realized that you know what we in the crypto world talked about so much that year was about how um you know DeFi kind of worked as expected. You the um software you know did liquidations in an early fashion. you didn't have that problem that you had with the CFI lenders where they um you know were either double posting collateral or they

were lying to people about you know anyway so um it's just interesting that then you know now we have this um trend where institutions are getting more involved and what they're doing is they are using these onchain protocols the you know the software and um Yeah, it I think it sort of like shows yeah how much trust they have in that system. Um, but I wanted to to you know ask a little bit more about the institutional view on the crypto markets because obviously we're quite well aware that retail sentiment right now is a little bit maybe more on the pessimistic side. So, you know, I wondered if yeah, you could

talk a little bit about where you think onchain institutional activity will go this year based on, you know, what you're hearing that they're interested about and and things like that. >> Yeah. No, I I I think uh great question. A few recent things are kind of signpost in the way of institutional activity. So, uh a few weeks back, Leen was able to successfully securitize some Bitcoin back loans. they were able to get a rating on that uh deal from S&P and it was arranged by uh Jeffers so you know very large wellrespected uh uh traditional investment bank [snorts] uh last week we also saw Kraken and NASDAQ announced there was going to be 247

uh trading of of tokenized equities and then uh the other point I would mention is uh you know this is going back further a few months but you saw that JP Morgan also indicated they might look at uh lending against Bitcoin collater I would say see that's three important sectors so investment banks commercial banks and uh and uh equities exchanges and so I think this highlights three of the key trends so we're obviously biased towards the crypto lending space but in our view there are real businesses there that produce revenues in cryptoback lending And there's currently over 50 million

Americans who hold crypto of some kind. We think that share is going to grow over time. And so there's going to be more of a need to lend against Bitcoin or provide credit against Bitcoin over time. So I expect that trend to continue and I expect private credit firms and banks to start to get involved. The other element is crypto has uh highlighted the the need or rather the the consumer appetite for 24/7 trading. And so I think you're going to see more assets tokenized so that they can trade 24/7. That's really being driven by crypto and meme coins and uh prediction markets starting to encroach on what used to be the the territory of of traditional exchanges and uh and then

the other thing is I expect you to continue to see tokenization of funds and other assets over time. So these are three of the big trends that we're seeing this year. uh how I think you need to position yourself is being able to work with traditional players uh to uh you know to partner with them on say accepting their tokenized funds as collateral or uh you know or sourcing funding or or you know structuring facilities where you can access traditional capital. That's one of the things that Maple is focused on uh for 2026.

>> Okay. Yeah. and and just explain a little bit more about that, you know, because we saw this news about NASDAQ and Kraken. I don't know if you saw Vlad Tennvive of Robin Hood was quoted um I I didn't catch the exact quote, but it was something like, you know, tokenization is going to eat everything essentially. Um so, you know, how do you think that will intersect a little bit with the onchain lending world? Yeah, it's it's a great question and uh so I I I have heard Vat uh Vlad speak before on you know tokenization kind of eating everything and uh and then of course with with the recent Kraken announcement I have heard the NASDAQ CEO talk about it as well but the

way that it intersects crypto lending is right now the limits to the growth of our business whether it's Maple or Morpho or Ave or Oiler is uh stable coin inventory that you can lend out. So we need more stable coins. So the Genius Act has been very positive. And then the other the other point is collateral. So the primary collateral that we will lend against at the moment is uh large cap crypto whether it's Bitcoin, ETH, Salana, XRP. the more uh credible financial assets that get tokenized, whether these whether it's the S&P index or Nvidia uh or Microsoft or the MAG 7, the more collateral there is to lend. So

you have a flywheel there where as more assets get tokenized, you can do more lending against it and therefore it becomes more useful to tokenize more assets. And that flywheel will generate a feedback loop that attracts more and more people into uh tokenizing their assets. Wall Street asset managers uh whether they be Apollo or Black Rockck or Hamilton Lane uh look at tokenization as a way of getting new distribution, a way of growing their assets under management. And that's why they've been so attracted to and enticed by the trend as well. So in my view, it creates a feedback loop. But the part that we at Maplewood would play is we would be happy to lend against these tokenized tokenized assets whether they be

equities or or funds or or something else. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean just hearing you talk it's so clear. Um, you know, everybody's talking about how crypto and Tradfire are going to converge, but you know, once you hear, you know, just that simple unlock like um tokenizing stocks like it like then you start to see kind of the money Legos piece come together and it's not just crypto, but you know, all all forms of finance. Um, so I wanted to ask you a slightly technical question. Um, you know, I noticed you're on um, Ethereum Salana Arbitrum Base Mantle, Inc., there's probably a few others that I missed. Um, and we're in this position now where Ethereum is now

going to be focusing on scaling the L1 rather than following an L2centric roadmap. And, you know, obviously I saw so last year you deployed on Salana and just generally there's kind of a lot of options now about where to deploy. So, how do you think about that decision? And um and I'm also curious like if you have any thoughts on the strengths or weaknesses of the onchain institutional market both on Ethereum and Salana. >> Yeah, it's a it's a great question and uh and uh there's a there's a lot to there's a there is a lot to unpack. Uh I'm not technical so I will do my best to kind of simplify for the uh for the audience but effectively Maple deployed our key

contracts. So where we originate loans to institutional borrowers takes place on Ethereum uh and then but this limited our reach. So last year as we looked to other ecosystems that we wanted to be part of and and participate in in their growth with alongside them uh we looked first at Salano and how we approached is more of a hub and spoke model. So currently from April Ethereum remains the hub. This is where we do loans to our institutional borrowers and it's where the smart contracts primarily sit and then you have the spokes which are our presence on other chains. So Maple uh partnered with chain link and used

CCIP to bring syrup USDC and syrup USDT to other chains. So syrup USDC is on Salana and this was our first big crosschain push and what we had to do is we had to look at why hadn't yield products worked on you know when they had been bridged across to Salana in the past and what we found was they weren't integrated with the ecosystem there. So how we've approached crosschain has been Maple tries to partner with the lending protocols and the money markets on other chains so that syrup USDC or syrup USDT can be uh held as collateral and looped and and and bring yield to those ecosystems. It then means that it makes it more useful having stable coins on those ecosystems

as a holder. So the ecosystem likes it, the other DeFi protocols like it and they don't view us as much as competition but instead a partner who can help them grow. So uh as we look at other chains, our key focus has always been we're kind of chain agnostic. Like, we would like to be on as many chains as possible, but the way that we make decisions is kind of first and foremost commercial. How many stable coins are on that chain? And therefore, how many potential customers do we have if we go to that chain? It's no good going to a technically brilliant chain that has little to no stable coins on there because there just won't be any customers for us. So that's sort of how we look at it. Uh as I look at institutional adoption, I think the

liquidity and the uh the liquidity and the supply of stable coins on Ethereum really is a a very material lead and advantage for it as an ecosystem. And the way I've heard it expressed before is that Ethereum is kind of evolving as the debt capital market of onchain and of the onchain ecosystems. and Salana was kind of positioning itself as as almost the the sort of the equity uh capital market. I think the two will converge over time because I've seen uh you know I have seen significant debt transactions take place on Salana but I would say that you know in tech you tend to follow kind of power law distribution and so Ethereum does very much at this point kind of remain the hub and you can

see it as you can see it expressed in being the first chain that a lot of these tokenized funds are getting launched on and indeed in the fact that you know Maple Athena you know three very big uh yield, you know, sources of yield for people still most of the activity takes place on Ethereum. >> Okay, that's super interesting. Um, so I did also want to ask about another big trend that we're seeing, which is that Dows are having some challenges. There were a number of Dows in 2025 that disbanded or paused and obviously A is, you know, experiencing these tensions between the labs entity and the Dow. I

mean, it looks like it's resolved, but in a way where yeah, there's sort of a a split happening. Um, and you might have seen in Stan's uh little essay on X, he kind of talked about how >> having a DAO have kind of so much say over a protocol um just meant that there were challenges that it had in, you know, trying to be nimble and, you know, kind of like responding to the market. And so a little bit more centralization is in a way a competitive competitive advantage. Um but I was interested to you know hear you talk about how you think about that because you know obviously I I see Maple governance [snorts] token and you have a Dow. So yeah talk about how you think about um

that conundrum. >> Yeah it's it's an interesting one. I've I've I've sort of I've watched the the Ave matter uh play out and I'm you know I'm sympathetic to uh to both sides of the argument. We you know we work with with both teams and we have a great relationship with the Ave ecosystem. Um it was hard like navigating the navigating the uh DAO conundrum. A lot of the issues stem from really the regulatory enforcement environment of 2020 to to 2024 uh under uh chair Gendler where there was an emphasis that you had to be decentralized as aggressively as possible and this meant naturally you

had to then separate the labs entity because you have to employ people to kind of work on your protocol from a DAO or governance entity which functions like a treasury governs all of the code needs needs to have decentralized credible representation by token holders. And that uh it then created issues like uh you know should every budget decision need to be approved by the public at large who hold the token and does that prevent you from moving nimly or fast or taking taking risky bets when it comes to the direction that you want to take the protocol in. Um the way that we al also one other point to make is uh should you

raise should you raise capital by selling equity in the labs entity or should you only ever sell tokens in the DAO? the way that we approached the problem because we we encountered similar issues but uh fortunately or unfortunately we were much smaller than a so so over the course of uh you know 2020 to 2024 you know there there wasn't as much uh you know there wasn't as much public DAO interest in us um but what we did is at Maple we've we've always determined that you should just have one governance token that that manages everything and so We never raised equity into an a a conventional LLC entity from from venture capitalists. Instead,

everyone has just participated by holding or purchasing the token. So, we kept a single capital structure and I would encourage new startups to to kind of go in that direction. I think you can choose equity or a token, but you can't have both because you end up with conflicting priorities. Who owns the revenues? Who owns the assets? The other element is we've had uh consistent governance participation where anyone who holds the token can vote on the governance forum but we've tried to delegate enough responsibility to us as a core team like the labs company so that we can make efficient management decisions and move fast and uh you know and and make strategic

decisions for the benefit of the protocol rather than having to put every decision up for a committee. So I think there is a balance between uh agency and management and ownership and you have to strike that it's it's just the answer is it's just very difficult to do that uh for for Dows and that's why a number of them have you know experienced the issues that they have. Yeah, that bit about where you talked about how there's like a conflict um of interest with the token and the equity, you know, just reminds me of what happened with the Circle Axelar thing and you know, definitely the token holders really I think felt um burned basically by what happened there. So um >> we we put all of our IP into a Gernzi

trust and then the Cayman Foundation is the beneficiary of that trust. So hopefully we've we've kind of done enough work to to ensure that an axel like situation can't uh can't happen to the Maple ecosystem. >> And then but what about that bit about what Stani said about how he felt like when you have a DAO involved in governance then it kind of makes it harder for you to kind of respond in a nibble fashion you know the way that like a business would you know being more centralized. So how do you yeah manage that? >> I agree with that. I think ideally the the balance you strike early on is you set out here's the decisions the business is going to be responsible for and have delegated authority for and

it's accountable for these decisions and then here's what they need to escalate to the DAO and I think if you strike that balance early on it's it's possible to manage but I do sympathize with that like should the Dow should the Dow review everyone's salaries and set uh you know at the moment we put up a quarterly budget and we seek approval from the DAO um to you know effectively to finance uh budgetary expenses for the next quarter. However, if you had the DAO having if you needed to show you'd hit milestones before the DAO approves your budget to pay salaries for software developers, it

becomes harder to attract talent because you can't provide shity for their employment. what if you don't get your next budget approved? And uh also if you open it up to kind of everyone to question maybe maybe question is the wrong word but if you have to then kind of justify your entire strategic plan for the next year to to everybody who's in the DAO some who may be less across things than others then I think it it's naturally going to force you to move slower.

I think the the correct, you know, an analogy might be imagine if Steve Jobs had had to go and get approval from an entire committee of hundreds of thousands or maybe not thousands of people, but hundreds of people for every product decision he wanted to make ahead of time. You might risk never having had bets like the iPhone. Certainly, you couldn't have released a finished product because it would have been leaked like way ahead of time. Perhaps not the best analogy, but that's the way I think about it. And I and so I am very sympathetic to the argument that you do need some latitude and discretion in in in management.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Um well, the other kind of hot topic that I wanted to ask you about was AI. Um I'm sure you're seeing just how quickly AI is being integrated into crypto. Um, and I wondered how you're thinking about how to protect either against potential hacks or how to take advantage of AI um, for Maple. >> Yeah, AI AI has definitely been uh, a super hot topic this year and you know and with fantastic reason behind it. So I think uh, we're kind of thinking about AI in sort of three stages. So I think right now, you know, right now you use our engineering team uses it. We our

originations team uses it for screening new collateral or for letting us know if the if the portfolio is at risk. So if you're hitting if you're heading into a volatile trade in period and you need to make sure that you have everyone on deck. So every day I get an AI digest of here's all of Maple's loans, here's the collateral we have against all of them. Here's the volatility, the collateral, and is it increasing or decreasing? So that's kind of like stage one. That's, you know, very very low lift. Stage two for us would be can we engage with customers using AI? Could we send could we have an AI bot that detects if a position is approach approaching margin call and sends them an automatic notification lets them know the address

to send the the Bitcoin to and uh and you know helps them helps them troubleshoot the process. Stage So that's stage two and I think that's coming over the next 12 months. Stage three, which we're nowhere near yet, would be we have a senior underwriter on the maple team, and then they have a dozen agents underneath them who go out and do everything from negotiating new loan terms to helping to settle the loan to servicing the loans, collecting interest payments, and uh managing any margin calls or liquidations. That's stage three. But that is I do think we're going to get there. And it's gonna it's going to one benefit customers because you can charge less interest or tighter

margins. So less cost for them. Uh faster onboarding for everyone. So we will be able to underwrite decision loans much much faster. And then for anyone in the in the Maple ecosystem, it will mean that Maple will be able to manage multiples of the billions that we do today without significantly increasing our headcount. So all of that will mean ultimately more operating profits dropping through to the bottom line of the protocol. >> Great. Um well, last question for you. I saw that um I think this was some notes that your team sent to me and it said that Maple's targeting a $100 million in annual recurring revenue goal for 2026.

And I wondered if you Yeah. would talk a little bit about how you think you're going to reach that. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a good question and putting us on the spot. So, our our stretch target for the year is definitely 100 100 million AR. We're currently just over 30 million AR. So, we've been doing well, but we have about a 3 to 4x to go from here. Uh the way that that will work for us is we managed about 4 billion today. So, what we would need to do is about 4x it. So, we we'd need to be up towards, you know, between somewhere between 15 and 20 billion AUM.

This is not unachievable. So if you look in Q4, Maple went from the fourth ranked uh institutional lender to number two just behind Tether. So if we continue to gain market share there, I think it's very eminently possible for us to get to that number. And then uh today we today deployments are lower. So as in there's not as much borrow appetite in the market. So what we're doing is one we are uh you know speaking to a number of large borrowers. So now we're expanding to more exchanges, more uh crypto or bitcoin miners.

So we're looking at more borrow deployments. And then we're also looking at things like uh private credit on chain. Might we allocate there that will help pick up the utilization and bring up the revenues that the protocol earns. and and ultimately it's that combination of more assets under management, higher utilization rate of deployments, and branching into new areas like private credit that will help Maple hit 100 mil ARR. So, that's the uh that's that's the goal, but still a lot of work to do. >> All right. Well, we'll have to see how it all plays out. I look forward to um hearing an update from you in the future.

>> Yeah, love that. Let's go back on. >> All right. Well, Sid, it was so nice speaking with you. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained. >> Thanks for having me, Laura.