Maple Finance Launches $40M Lending Pool as Contagion Fear Subsides

Maven 11’s third pool on Maple boasts borrowers including Wintermute, Auros and Flow Traders

article-image

Source: DALL·E

share

key takeaways

  • The new pool is a DeFi debut for market maker Flow Traders
  • Industry lenders went risk-off in recent months, Maple CEO Sid Powell said

Maple Finance is touting its new $40 million institutional lending pool as a positive sign for the industry in the wake of its recent liquidity crisis.

The pool — led by crypto investment firm Maven 11 — boasts initial borrowers including Wintermute, Flow Traders and Auros, the company revealed Wednesday.

It is the first time Flow Traders, the major Dutch market maker and trading firm, has jumped into DeFi, Maple Finance CEO Sid Powell told Blockworks. 

Maple Finance is a marketplace for crypto capital. It offers undercollateralized lending infrastructure for institutional lenders and corporate borrowers. 

Founded in May 2021, Maple hit $1 billion in loans in its first 10 months. The company has now issued more than $1.5 billion in loans, according to its website. Total deposits are now roughly $600 million. 

Maple aggregates capital on behalf of large borrowers. Rather than a borrower negotiating deals and maintaining contact with a dozen prospective lenders, one entity (in this case Maven 11) assesses the borrower’s risk and manages a collateralized asset pool.

Lenders risk-on again?

Lenders around the industry went risk-off in recent months in response to the market downturn.

Centralized lender Celsius, for example, initiated bankruptcy proceedings last month after suspending withdrawals and transfers in June. A number of others were doomed by its exposure to crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy after being ordered into liquidation by a British Virgin Islands court.

Maple Finance CEO Sid Powell
Maple Finance CEO Sid Powell

Still, Powell saw continued interest from borrowers throughout the period. “Over the course of the last few months we were in a kind of holding pattern,” Powell said. “And now that we’ve seen concerns around contagion subside, we were able to pick up the opportunity to start lending again.”

London-headquartered custody startup Qredo will help facilitate the lending pool with Maven 11 — a digital asset investment firm founded in Amsterdam. Qredo will offer a multisig solution to manage blockchain addresses for more security and operational efficiency.

The permissioned pool ensures a regulatory sound process in which institutional lenders must complete know-your-customer and anti-money laundering onboarding. This will be Maven 11’s third lending pool on Maple, as it has two others sized at about $500 million combined. They became the second pool delegate on the DeFi (decentralized finance) platform in July 2021.

“Maven saw no defaults across any of their pools, so they outperformed significantly across all other lenders in the space,” Powell said. “That’s why they are the first cab off the rank to set up this new pool and resume lending again.”

As of the start of June, just one loan default of $10 million had occurred out of Maple’s $900 million in outstanding deposits, according to Powell.

Celsius became the first centralized finance institution to deploy its services on Maple in February, starting with under-collateralized loans from a $30 million pool of wrapped ether (WETH).

In late June, at the worst of the crypto ecosystem’s recent liquidity crunch, Maple noted on its website that “there may be instances where there is insufficient cash in pools, and lenders must wait for borrower repayments.”

Powell said Celsius’ loans were “performing well” and that the company would continue to receive repayments of loans it lent out to borrowers over the next few months.

Maple is corporate finance, on-chain

Blockchains offer operational efficiency to digital asset capital markets such as Maple, which the firm hopes to combine with a user experience that can help it grow beyond crypto natives.

Maple is focused on replicating the $3 trillion corporate finance market, on-chain. Success would see its institutional pool delegates extend loans to fintechs, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and businesses in other sectors, all powered by smart contracts. 

The platform had solely operated on Ethereum until April this year, when it expanded to rival network Solana. 

Most of Maple’s collateral is on Ethereum, with just 2% of its total value locked on Solana, per DeFi Llama.

“You say commonly within crypto once you’ve used USDC you never really want to go back to using a bank account,” Powell said. “Well what we want to show is once you’ve either lent into one of these pools or borrowed from one of these pools, you’d never really want to go back and use a bank.”


Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 18 - 20, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

kamino cover.jpg

Research

Kamino has solidified its position as the leading money market on Solana and is emerging as a DeFi bluechip. Although DeFi competition is fierce, Kamino has kept iterating on its product to provide the best-in-class UX, paired with a robust risk management framework and battle-tested infrastructure. Given the rollout of Kamino Lend V2, the protocol may scale aggressively over the coming months, penetrating previously untapped markets in Solana DeFi.

article-image

Why that the bull market might not start until 2025

article-image

August’s annual headline figure came in at 2.3% after an upward revision Thursday, so things are moving in the right direction 

article-image

MSTR’s stock price was roughly $248 at 2 pm ET Thursday

article-image

Ever since rates came off zero and fiscal deficits exploded, markets have started paying close attention to how the government is funding itself

article-image

Solana memecoins are collectively at an all-time high

article-image

Optimistic rollups like Optimism, Arbitrum and Base are seeing rapid adoption relative to zk rollups