Maple Memo October 2026: Q3 Results and the Future of Banks

Dave Beach

Editorial & Communications Lead

To the Maple community,

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

Maple highlights

Q3: Growing while the market shrank. The DeFi lending market contracted 29% this year, and Maple's loan book grew. Sid's explanation on the Q3 Ecosystem Update? Borrowers come to Maple for terms and structure that pooled protocols don't offer, and that matters most when the rest of the market pulls back.

$4.8B in assets under management
$1.67B in loans outstanding, up 12% year over year
syrupUSD returned 1.26% above major peers (last 30 days, yields are variable and not guaranteed)

Henri Arslanian, founder, podcaster, and author, joined Sid to give his view on the biggest challenge facing institutional onchain adoption. Watch the Q3 Ecosystem Update on-demand.

Buybacks doubled in September. Protocol revenue crossed $1.5M in September, and under MIP-021 that lifts the share of revenue going to buybacks from 10% to 20%. The SYRUP Strategic Fund bought 1.37M SYRUP, about double August's 0.68M, taking Q3 buybacks to 2.9M SYRUP. You can see every purchase on the Transparency page.

Fiat at onchain speed. As we deploy more capital, the dollars moving between Maple and our institutional counterparties need to match the speed and precision of our onchain lending. Maple has partnered with IRACE Digital Bank for cash management, payments, and settlement with those counterparties.

You may have noticed Maple's new look. Earlier this year, we asked partners, lenders, borrowers, and token holders to describe Maple, and almost every group gave a different answer. We've originated more than $25B since 2019, and our business has outgrown the brand. We kept the logo and Maple orange, and rebuilt everything else around what we do: Putting capital to work, onchain, where anyone can check what backs it. Maple’s Head of Marketing, Natalie Williams, explains the thinking in Why our brand is evolving.

Maple in the media

On Fintech TV, Sid told host Johny Fernandez that Robinhood Earn users collect yield from Maple's institutional loans without ever making a blockchain approval.
In Cointelegraph Magazine, Sid said serious lenders should assume any borrower can fail at any time and work backward from there.
At LONGITUDE Singapore, Sid joined Fidelity, UBS, and Securitize on a tokenization panel, and said asset managers are moving onchain because capital there costs less than they can borrow for in traditional finance.

Insight: Banks will hold less of your money

Silicon Valley Bank lost $42B in about 10 hours in March 2023, and nobody lined up outside a branch. Depositors moved their money from an app. Once money moves that fast, a checking account paying around 10bps stops being the obvious home for spare cash, and banks face two costly options: Raise deposit rates and squeeze their spread, or hold rates and watch deposits leave.

Sid expects most idle cash to move into tokenized credit with a defined term, yield, and level of risk, managed by agents that rebalance between products on onchain rails that never close. Fintechs including Robinhood Earn, Bitso, Littio, and Plasma One already sell a rate and a term rather than a flat balance. Bank accounts still hold an operating balance, but the bank's job narrows. Read more

What we're watching in the industry

S&P now grades lending vaults. Onchain lending vaults hold $10B, enough for S&P Global Ratings to publish a framework for grading them on October 4. It scores six areas: Portfolio credit quality, liquidity mismatch, curator risk, blockchain risk, protocol risk, and vault security and governance. S&P says it built the framework for institutional investors that need a structured way to assess onchain lending exposure.

Henri Arslanian on Token2049. On our Q3 Ecosystem Update, Henri said bank executives came to Singapore to share live projects this year, and treated tokenization and onchain credit as an accelerating part of finance. Watch his full fireside chat in the Q3 Ecosystem Update replay.

Credit is the biggest tokenized asset. Of the $65B in tokenized real-world assets the IMF counted in July, credit made up $30.4B, ahead of money market funds at $17.5B and equities at $2.3B. The IMF names poor interoperability and the lack of widely accepted settlement assets as the main brakes on growth.

What's next

Over the next 12 months, we're scaling distribution and broadening the assets we finance, starting with fintech receivables and lending against rated securities. We'll report loans outstanding, revenue, and risk every quarter in the same format.

The team will be at Money20/20 US next week, so if you'll be on the ground, check out our two events: The Money20/20 Bootcamp and By Invitation Only dinner | 10.19.

For your diaries, our next AMA will be on November 11 (register here), and the next quarterly Ecosystem Update call will be in January 2027, details to follow closer to the time.