Key Takeaways
- Maple Finance is approaching $3 billion in assets under management.
- The lender has staged a remarkable comeback since deposits dwindled in the wake of the FTX-Alameda crash.
- Crypto lenders increasingly disburse loans in stablecoins, with USDC the most popular choice on Maple.
Three years after Maple Finance was nearly wiped out by bad loans tied to FTX and Alameda, the DeFi lender has staged an impressive comeback.
As of July 15, the platform had over $2.95 billion in assets under management (AUM), with around $732 million deployed as USDC loans.
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Maple Finance Back From the Brink
After FTX collapsed in November 2022, Maple Finance was hit hard when Orthogonal Trading, a borrower that was highly exposed to the rogue crypto exchange, defaulted on over $30 million in loans.
That default severely damaged investor trust, causing Maple’s total deposits to plummet 97%, from over $900 million to around $25 million.
Maple’s AUM didn’t recover to pre-FTX levels until 2025. But in recent months, growth has snowballed.
Tokenized Private Credit Booms
Alongside Figure and Tradable, Maple Finance is at the forefront of a boom in tokenized private credit, which has emerged as the largest tokenized real-world asset segment.
Together, the three largest platforms dominate what has become a $14 billion market, granting retail investors access to predictable returns through a variety of on-chain loan products.
With Maple, investors deposit stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies into “syrup pools” and receive yield-bearing tokens in return.
Yields are generated from Maple’s loans to vetted institutional borrowers, including crypto hedge funds and trading firms.
Stablecoin Lending
Post-FTX, Maple has pivoted away from unsecured and under-collateralized lending, and it typically requires borrowers to overcollateralize their loans, often using BTC or ETH.
Liquidity providers can also deposit a variety of cryptocurrencies in Maple’s syrup pools. However, these days, it mostly lends out stablecoins.
USDC loans dominate, accounting for 92% of outstanding syrup loans on Jul 15, with USDT making up the rest.
As adoption grows, stablecoin loan disbursements are increasingly popular among crypto lenders.
While DeFi platforms like Aave have always supported stablecoin loans, increasingly, regulated, centralized lenders like Ledn offer stablecoins as an option alongside fiat.
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James Morales is CCN’s blockchain and crypto policy reporter. He has been working in the news media since 2020, writing about topics such as payments, banking and financial technology. These days, he likes to explore the latest blockchain innovations and the evolving landscape of global crypto regulation.
With an educational background in social anthropology and media studies, James uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.
