Maple Memo, August 2026: AUM Steadies, Buybacks Turn On

Sidney Powell

CEO and Co-Founder

To the Maple community,

Welcome to the Maple Memo, our monthly update. Below, we'll capture what happened this month inside Maple and across the market, and where we're headed next.

Maple highlights

AUM eased in July, then steadied. Our Transparency page shows AUM at $4.55B today, slightly down from H1's $4.6B peak after dipping further through July, and recovering since. The fundamentals underneath held up through that stretch: $6.4B in H1 originations, exceeding our full-year 2025 total, and H1 revenue of $12.2M.

syrupUSDG scales rapidly. We launched syrupUSDG from a standing start in July, and it's already up 12% in the past month despite the expected summer slow down. It’s live as collateral behind Robinhood Earn. That yield has staying power too. syrupUSDG has held a 60-90 basis point premium over syrupUSDT every day this month, and stayed ahead of syrupUSDC on most of them. As Sid put it on this month's AMA call, stablecoin yield “continues to be underserved in the market,” and syrupUSDG's growth backs that up.

First buyback under MIP-021. Maple completed its first buyback under the new rules-based framework: 852,840 SYRUP purchased for 136,768 USDT (avg. price $0.1604), 10% of monthly net revenue. We track every buyback in real time on the Transparency page.

The history of credit. Martin de Rijke, head of growth, published the first entry in a new blog series placing Maple's work inside 4,000 years of credit, from Mesopotamian grain loans through 2008 and into onchain credit today. Worth a read for the deeper “why” behind what we're building.

Maple in the media

Three different angles on Maple this month: Outside research on how we performed through a volatile quarter, our take on where the rest of the stablecoin market is headed, and a longer conversation with Henri Arslanian on the future of onchain asset management.

GLC Research published its Q2 2026 report on Maple, covering how the protocol performed through a volatile quarter for digital assets.
On Sandmark, we weighed in on Tether's stablecoin strategy, arguing USDT will likely stay focused on international, non-US-compliant markets as a separate product line.
On Henri Arslanian's Future of Money podcast, we discussed onchain asset management, touching on private credit's compressed timeline, and why Bitcoin miners are increasingly borrowing against BTC instead of selling it.

Insight: How does onchain credit actually reach mainstream users, and who owns the customer?

Building an underwriting business takes years. A credit engine needs a credit team, borrower relationships, legal structuring, custody arrangements, and margin call infrastructure, which we've built up since we started overcollateralized lending in 2023. Most consumer apps have no interest in owning that complexity. They want to own and grow the customer relationship, not the credit risk.

Robinhood Earn shows how that split works in practice. A user taps Earn and deposits, the capital routes into a Morpho vault curated by Steakhouse, and that vault lends against syrupUSDG, a wrapper on one of our segregated lending portfolios. We sit at the base of the stack as one of the yield sources, and the user never touches custody, an approval, or a seed phrase, only a fintech interface. The program has scaled to around $700M in about six weeks, roughly $230M of it sitting in Maple AUM today.

That is why we see ourselves as complementary rather than competitive with neobanks and fintechs. Rather than own the customer relationship directly, we package the credit engine and distribute it through fintechs and neobanks with established brands, a category we're calling Maple Embed. Put differently, it’s the Trojan horse that puts digital-asset products in mainstream hands. We expect this to be one of our largest growth channels over the next 12 months, with more integrations still to come.

What we're watching in the industry

RWA adoption, still measured in single digits. Tokenized T-bills, private credit structures, and a handful of corporate bonds are live, but the total across every category still sits in the single-digit billions. One data point puts our own position in perspective: Among the top five RWA products by TVL on Ethereum, we account for two, sitting ahead of BlackRock, Janus Henderson, and WisdomTree. The gating factor now is regulatory clarity. Worth watching how fast liquidity follows once it lands.

Private credit's decades-long arc, compressed. In The Future of Money podcast this month, Sid drew a direct line from Drexel Burnham and Michael Milken's junk-bond era to today's private credit giants, and argues stablecoin-based credit could compress a maturation that took traditional private credit three decades or more into a fraction of the time. Worth watching whether onchain credit actually compresses that timeline or just repeats it faster.

Miners borrowing against Bitcoin instead of selling it. Bitcoin miners are increasingly finding Maple a cheaper way to finance AI data-center buildouts: Borrowing against BTC at a 6-12% cost of capital rather than selling Bitcoin at a 52-week low or diluting through equity issuance.

What's next

Roadmap-wise, expect more Syrup assets beyond USDG, more chains beyond where we are today, and more structured, fintech-facing facilities in the vein of Kraken's warehouse deal.

The best places to hear it directly are our next community AMA on September 16, 2026, and the quarterly call with Sid and Joe covering Q3 results on October 13, 2026. Register for the September AMA here and submit your community questions here.

Sid and Joe, Maple