Institutional lending protocol Maple Finance said on Thursday that the crypto asset manager Bitwise has begun using its platform to provide loans to other institutions.
Maple co-founder and CEO Sidney Powell told Decrypt that the decentralized finance, or DeFi, lender is among Bitwise’s initial allocations in the overcollateralized lending space, which faced scrutiny amid a series of high-profile blowups that culminated in FTX’s collapse in 2022.
After depositing over $1 million worth of the stablecoin USDC into one of Maple’s lending strategies, which are managed on-chain using smart contracts, Powell said that Bitwise is earning around a 9.5% yield on what would otherwise be untapped funds.
“They are deploying cash while they wait to select new fund managers,” he said, describing the arrangement as “entirely self-service and totally transparent.”
Maple sits at the crossroads of DeFi and traditional lending. While the company is responsible for selecting borrowers, negotiating terms, and collecting payments, the service is underpinned by decentralized infrastructure that ultimately sends the loans out. The Maple DAO is in control of the project's treasury funds, while that entity is governed around an associated SYRUP token.
Overcollateralized loans, which are conventional in DeFi, require a borrower to lock up crypto with a higher value than the amount they’d like to take out. The practice can reduce liquidation risk, and Bitwise chose a strategy that only accepts Bitcoin and Ethereum as collateral.
“We’ve always sought to take advantage of crypto-native investments that generate dynamic, uncorrelated returns,” Bitwise Head of Alpha Strategies and Portfolio Manager Jeff Park said in a statement. “Maple’s deep expertise and battle-tested infrastructure position Bitwise and our clients well to access the opportunities with confidence and scale.”
Maple has generated $27 million in fees since 2023, while the assets on its lending platform are currently worth $427 million, according to the DeFi data provider DeFiLlama.
Bitwise engaged in a lengthy due diligence process prior to its Maple allocation, but Powell said asset managers interacting with DeFi firms may become more commonplace alongside regulatory shifts under President Donald Trump’s administration.
In particular, Powell pointed to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent repeal of Staff Accounting Bulletin (SAB) No. 121. First introduced in 2022, the guidance required companies to record a liability and a corresponding asset for crypto assets held on users’ behalf.
Cantor Fitzgerald, which helps manage Tether’s stablecoin reserves, said last July that it would start a Bitcoin-backed lending program. At the time, the firm’s Chairman and CEO, Howard Lutnick—who has since become Trump’s commerce secretary—said that he’s excited to continue “bridging the gap between traditional finance and digital assets.”
The Bitcoin development firm Blockstream recently secured billions of dollars to introduce three new funds, two of which will enable crypto lending, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
“I think it won’t be long before you see more of these types of products emerge,” Powell said, describing lending against Bitcoin for yield as “among the oldest on-chain credit strategies."
Edited by James Rubin