Maple Finance Expands to Solana

Maple Finance, the decentralized marketplace for institutional lending, has launched on Solana. Alongside its partners, Maple will introduce a $45 million pool to initially grow its Solana ecosystem.

Maple Finance Now Multi-Chain

An underserved area of decentralized finance—uncollateralized lending—has expanded to a new blockchain.

Maple Finance has gone live on Solana. The team behind the corporate debt marketplace is beginning with $45 million to issue uncollateralized loans on the Solana blockchain with plans for a $300 million pool by the end of 2022.

Partners behind the expansion include the privacy-preserving, data-driven lending platform X-Margin, the digital asset managers CoinShares, and the stablecoin issuer Circle.

On the announcement, Sidney Powell, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Maple, said:

“Building the first multi-chain capital market solution has and will continue to attract high quality lenders and borrowers, create unprecedented growth opportunities for innovators building on Solana, and enable the entire industry to thrive.”

Using Maple Finance, crypto-native companies can utilize uncollateralized loans to optimize their operations in a capital-efficient manner that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. The first borrowers on Maple Solana include the crypto-focused venture firm Framework, as well as the Sam Bankman-Fried-backed trading firm Alameda Research.

As a crossover between decentralized and centralized finance, Maple employs human actors to evaluate potential borrowers for creditworthiness. Hopeful borrowers must undergo a rigorous process of due diligence before being granted a loan. The first pool delegate that will do this on Maple Solana is X-Margin, which is tasked with credit scoring addition to actually issuing, underwriting, and managing interest and payments of the institutional loans. It will use Maple’s infrastructure to actively manage these tasks.

At press time, the Maple Solana pool has over $34 million in Circle’s USDC stablecoin and is likely to hit its initial capacity soon. Having only launched nearly one year ago, Maple has so far provided around $900 million of liquidity to the Ethereum ecosystem, and it has originated around $1.2 billion worth of loans.

Last February, Maple further expanded its services into the realm of centralized finance lenders via its onboarding of Celsius, which introduced $30 million in wrapped Ethereum that institutions could potentially borrow. To help ensure that institutions maintain confidence that they can use Maple in a manner compliant with regulations, all borrowers are required to undergo know-your-customer and anti-money laundering checks.

The Maple Solana team also has plans to launch its SYRUP governance token sometime in the next three to six months, which will be similar to the MPL token that exists for Maple Ethereum. Moreover, a representative from Maple told Crypto Briefing that the next loan assessor to be onboarded after X-Margin will be “an established b2b crypto lender, brokerage, custody, and trading firm.”

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other cryptocurrencies.