Maple Finance, the future of on-chain institutional asset management?

Since the launch of Binance Spot in May, SYRUP has risen more than twice against the trend.

Written by: @defi_gaz, Castle Labs

Compiled by: Alex Liu, Foresight News

This cycle is challenging for many people. If I had to describe it in one word, it would likely be "extraction."

The native funds in the crypto space are flowing at an unprecedented speed, leaving even the most experienced "gamblers" feeling dizzy. Major protocols are doing everything they can to introduce various incentives, trying to bring limited liquidity into their products, even if these funds only stay for a few days before the next hot spot appears.

At the same time, Bitcoin's dominance has continued to rise since the low in November 2022, thanks mainly to what seems to be an endless wave of institutional buying.

Bitcoin market share, data: TradingView

The insights here are self-evident.

There is no doubt that the crypto market is maturing. We are finally seeing the regulatory clarity needed to drive the next phase of industry development, and many protocols are also shifting their target user groups towards different types of participants.

The giants are here, and they come with substantial funds.

We have seen the influence of these large institutions. The entire real-world assets (RWA) sector is steadily growing, the current total value locked (TVL) has risen to approximately 12.6 billion dollars.

Many leaders in the field are developing products aimed at institutional capital participation, some of which are even being built directly by the institutions themselves.

In emerging projects, Maple Finance stands out with its rapid growth in revenue and assets under management (AUM). This rapid growth is clearly reflected in the price trend of the SYRUP token, and there are no signs of slowing down.

What is Maple Finance?

In summary, Maple Finance aims to bring asset management on-chain by providing a set of financial products tailored specifically for institutions, with a particular focus on lending.

The team was established in 2019 and has a strong background in traditional finance. They are well aware of the conditions required for large institutions to enter the crypto world on a large scale.

Maple has adopted a minimalist strategy regarding the types of collateral used on its platform, focusing solely on top-tier blue-chip coins and stablecoins—exactly the type of assets that large institutions are eager to access.

Data speaks for itself.

Source: Maple Finance Dune Dashboard

According to the latest data from the Maple Finance Dune dashboard, its total assets under management (AUM) is approximately $2.2 billion, having grown by over $1 billion since early May. This represents an astonishing 5-fold increase compared to the data from January 1, 2025.

The active outstanding loans on the platform also saw a similar increase, rising by about 30% in May.

Maple's revenue performance is also strong, with recent monthly revenue surpassing 1 million USD, a month-on-month increase of 61.21% compared to April. Since March 2023, its average monthly revenue growth rate has remained at about 28%, with a clear trend.

These revenues mainly come from the interest sharing charged to borrowers and the income generated from depositing collateral into DeFi protocols.

Source: Maple Finance Dune Dashboard

Maple offers 3 unique lending products that contribute to its impressive performance:

• High Yield Products: Net annualized yield (APY) of 9%, using BTC, ETH, and a selection of top altcoins as collateral.
• Blue Chip Lending: Net annualized yield of 6.9%, using only BTC and ETH as collateral.
• Bitcoin Earnings: Allows large institutional Bitcoin holders to earn a net annual return of 4-6% on their held BTC.

It is worth noting that products with higher yields require higher over-collateralization rates to compensate for the higher volatility of the underlying assets used as collateral.

In-depth Analysis of Maple

Maple is rapidly becoming the preferred platform for large institutional borrowers. Its strict borrower screening process - ensuring they can meet their financial commitments - is key to distinguishing it from other lending protocols.

These licensed borrowers need to undergo an in-depth underwriting process, assess their balance sheet strength, and ensure they have the operational capability to meet margin call requirements in a declining market.

The underlying collateral is held by institutional-grade custody solutions, Maple provides on-chain collateral verifiability, allowing lenders to view the collateral details of each outstanding loan.

With highly liquid blue-chip tokens as collateral and proactive, institutional-grade collateral management, Maple is able to continuously and securely provide yields above market levels.

Thanks to the process of selecting the best borrowers and the highest quality collateral, as well as a focus on short-term loan durations, liquidation events are extremely rare in the Maple ecosystem.

SYRUP token

The SYRUP token is the native token of Maple.

SYRUP is used for platform governance, incentivizing participation through staking, and allowing holders to benefit from the growth of the Maple ecosystem.

Currently, approximately 42.7% of the 1.07 billion SYRUP tokens in circulation have been staked on the platform.

Stakers can earn rewards from the token buyback of Maple (thanks to the protocol's revenue) and receive an annualized yield of 2.7%, with no lock-up period.

The release plan for SYRUP is approximately 5% per year, continuing for 3 years from inception. This means that all SYRUP tokens will be fully circulated by September 2026.

syrupUSDC/USDT and Drips rewards

Users who lend USDC or USDT on the Maple platform will receive corresponding liquidity certificates (LP Token): syrupUSDC or syrupUSDT. After obtaining syrupUSDT, they will immediately start accumulating an annualized yield of 6.6%, and it can be used across various DeFi platforms.

The annualized yield of syrupUSDC is approximately 10.6%, outperforming protocols such as AAVE, Ethena, and Compound. Coupled with its extreme focus on security, Maple has become the preferred choice for users seeking to maximize stablecoin returns.

In addition to earning rewards by depositing USDC or USDT and DeFi use cases, lenders will also receive Drip rewards. These rewards can be converted into more staked SYRUP tokens at the end of each "season," allowing users to compound their SYRUP holdings over time.

Drips compounds every 4 hours, thereby increasing the total annualized yield for SYRUP stakers.

Cooperation and Integration

In the past few months, Maple has achieved several notable collaborations and plans to continue expanding its network in both the crypto and traditional finance sectors.

April 2025: Announced a significant partnership with Spark, including an investment of 50 million USDC into syrupUSDC.

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March 2025:

• Bitwise has joined and started allocating funds to the Maple ecosystem, further solidifying Maple's position as the preferred ecosystem for large institutional capital.
• Maple announced its entry into the Convergence ecosystem. This initiative is led by Ethena and integrates protocols such as Pendle and Morpho, aiming to accelerate the on-chain adoption rate of institutional-grade real-world assets (RWA).

February 2025: The Core Foundation partnered with Maple to announce the launch of the lstBTC product, a liquid, yield-bearing Bitcoin token designed for institutions to earn returns from their held BTC.

May 2025 (latest): Maple completed its first Bitcoin collateral financing from global investment bank Cantor. This opened a $2 billion initial financing channel for institutional Bitcoin holders to leverage their BTC through the Maple ecosystem.

In addition, for users looking to enhance returns through syrupUSDC while simultaneously earning up to 5x multiplier Drip rewards, the integration of syrupUSDC with Pendle is an ideal choice.

competitive landscape

The field in which Maple Finance operates primarily consists of large funds, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals.

Due to Maple underwriting its loans and requiring all borrowers to complete the KYC (Know Your Customer) process to prove their creditworthiness, it occupies a unique niche between DeFi and centralized finance (CeFi).

This addresses the two major issues that existed in the past DeFi and CeFi models:

• Large institutional participants wish to deploy capital on-chain through decentralized platform providers to mitigate associated risks.
• The process of obtaining credit through traditional financial methods or in the world of centralized financial providers is slow, costly, and heavily restricted.

Maple aims to address these two issues through a hybrid approach: combining the common over-collateralization found in DeFi lending protocols with the typical strict compliance, credit assessment, and borrower underwriting of the traditional financial world.

Compared to other platforms in the field, we are starting to see the undervalued potential of Maple.

For example, Ondo Finance has a TVL of approximately $1.3 billion, a market cap (MC) of $2.6 billion, and a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of about $8.36 billion.

BlackRock's Buidl has a TVL of approximately $2.9 billion, with a market cap also of $2.9 billion (considering fully diluted tokens).

Maple currently has a TVL of 2.2 billion USD, while its market capitalization is only 567.8 million USD. Even considering full dilution, its valuation is only about 631 million USD.

Based on the comparison of TVL and market capitalization, the potential rise of Maple compared to its competitors seems very clear.

Clearly, this is a very basic method of value assessment, and many factors need to be considered when evaluating the future potential of a protocol; however, it quickly reveals the value discrepancies present in the current institutional lending space.

As the scale of the entire field continues to expand, Maple's recent growth rate puts it in a promising position to surpass its competitors' performance - provided that its growth can maintain the current pace and does not flatten out in the short term.

Conclusion

As a relatively new player in the decentralized lending space, Maple has a significant advantage in positioning and is expected to capture a substantial market share in the coming months and even years.

Their goal is to achieve a TVL of 4 billion dollars by the end of this year, as follows:

• syrupUSDC/USDT: 1 billion USD
• Bitcoin income products: 1.5 billion dollars
• Other Maple institutional product suite: $1.5 billion

Whether they can achieve these goals will be answered by time, but so far the situation is positive.

As the entire cryptocurrency market matures, projects with solid fundamentals are more likely to gain market share during the transition of investor types from retail to institutional.

These institutional participants are likely to look for the types of indicators they are accustomed to in the traditional financial world. Price-to-earnings ratios (PE ratios), income generation capacity, and moats will be their primary focus when entering this field.

Therefore, following in their footsteps, extending our investment time horizon, and seeking outstanding performance from those protocols with real fundamentals (rather than the past critically important "hype fundamentals" - pumpamentals) is likely to yield returns.