Maple Memo, July 2026: A Record H1, Against the Tide

Sidney Powell

CEO and Co-Founder

To the Maple community,

Welcome to the Maple memo, our new monthly update.

We've closed out one of the strongest stretches in Maple's history, and Q3 is well underway. Below we’ll capture what happened this month and quarter inside Maple and across the market, and where we're headed next.

Maple highlights

A record first half, against the tide. We closed H1 2026 with assets under management (AUM) at $4.6B, up 81% year over year, and Q2 revenue up 47% versus the same quarter last year. What we're proudest of: Maple grew straight through a market where total DeFi value locked fell roughly 38%, a signal that institutional demand for onchain credit is structural, not cyclical.

syrupUSDG launched. We launched syrupUSDG, our first new Syrup asset in two years, bringing Maple's credit engine to Global Dollar (USDG) on Robinhood Chain as collateral behind Robinhood Earn, the first decentralized lending product inside the Robinhood app. It reached $200M AUM in eight days, versus roughly a year for syrupUSDT, proof that institutional credit can reach retail without diluting our underwriting discipline. It's our clearest signal yet of a broader push into fintech distribution.

MIP-021 buybacks activated. SYRUP holders voted in our new rules-based buyback mechanism: 10% of monthly revenue is directed to buybacks when the protocol earns under $1.5M per month, scaling up to 30% when it earns above $2M. More updates coming to the Transparency Dashboard in August.

Kraken warehouse facility signed. We signed an onchain warehouse lending facility with Kraken, the first time institutional credit market protections have been fully replicated onchain: Maple provides senior financing through a bankruptcy-remote SPV, with Kraken Financial holding collateral as custodian. For Maple lenders, this opens yield from senior, overcollateralized loans backed by BTC and ETH, the same credit model behind auto loans and mortgages, now onchain.

Maple in the media

The institutional-credit thesis got real airtime this quarter, and the coverage is increasingly on our terms: Less "what is DeFi" and more "how does onchain credit reshape capital markets."

Fortune named Maple in its Crypto Innovators list, chosen from more than 150 nominations for 30 spots.
On the Milk Road Show, Sid explained how MIP-021 ties buybacks directly to protocol revenue and why institutional traction is outpacing retail sentiment despite bear market prices.
Genfinity's feature: "Maple Finance Is Pulling Institutional Credit On-Chain and Squeezing Wall Street's Fees," covered Maple's rise as a top global Bitcoin-backed lender, including a $500M loan settled on a Saturday at institutional rates.
On CNBC TV18's Crypto Corner, Sid discussed the Robinhood Chain announcement, the case for tokenized private credit in capital-starved markets like India, and Maple's push toward $10B in AUM, and $50M in annual recurring revenue.
On the Fintech Business Weekly podcast, Joe joined host Jason Mikula to talk through seven years of building in crypto, rising institutional adoption of crypto and stablecoins, and the Robinhood partnership.

Insight: Why Maple grows while DeFi contracts

This is the question we field more than any other: What makes Maple's yield different?

Most DeFi yield comes from token incentives or leverage demand, so it rises and falls with sentiment and evaporates with volatility. Maple's yield comes from borrower interest on loans, each facility overcollateralized, and that's why our book kept compounding while incentive-driven DeFi lending contracted through H1.

The numbers frame the divergence: Real-world assets (RWAs) were effectively the only major DeFi category posting net institutional growth in 2026, with onchain RWA value expanding to roughly $33.5B, up approximately 184% year over year, even as total DeFi TVL fell by more than a third.

Capital is rotating toward transparent, collateralized, cashflow-backed credit. We source it through Maple Earn and Maple Embed, and allocate it through Maple Credit, our overcollateralized institutional lending book. We've originated more than $22B since 2022, across multiple cycles.

What we're watching in the industry

The great bifurcation. Retail DeFi is cooling while institutional, permissioned onchain credit accelerates. Our roadmap is designed to capture this shift in demand.

The tokenized/RWA liquidity gap. Multiple research desks are pointing at the same problem we've worked on for years: Tokenized assets need active, liquid credit markets, not just custody rails. Of the roughly $33.5B tokenized, under 10% is active in DeFi. That gap is wide, and we expect more capital to chase it through H2.

Distribution as the next battleground. Robinhood and our other integrations point to a broader shift: Protocols are competing less on raw yield and more on where that yield actually shows up for the end customer. For a long time, crypto operated on its own island. What we're watching now are the bridges being built into the broader financial system, and Maple sits at that intersection, by design. Expect more of these announcements from us, and from competitors, through year-end.

What's next

Coming out of the Q2 Ecosystem Update call, recording here if you missed it, our H2 priorities are clear: Build out the real-time engine that monitors and allocates capital, and ship modular strategies that let integration partners choose exactly which lending strategy they plug into.

As always, thank you for building alongside us. We'll keep showing up here every month with a summary of where things stand, for Maple and for the broader market.

Sid and Joe, Maple