The numbers that are important tell a story about Maple’s growth in 2024. During the year, our Total Value Locked (TVL), the north star metric, climbed from $85m to a peak of over $600m. This growth is essential to Maple’s mission of becoming the world’s largest institutional lender, beginning with digital assets.
The highlights of 2024 include:
- $2.3b in new institutional originations
- $13.7m in interest to lenders (~10%+ yields on average across the year)
- A high of $600m+ TVL (8x YoY)
- Protocol revenue topped $6m ARR (10x YoY)
- Four new lending pools successfully launched
Late in 2023, we decided to concentrate on Secured Lending and overcollateralized loans. What began with a single lending pool featuring BTC backed loans then quickly expanded with the launch of our High Yield Secured lending pool in Q2, which accepted more types of collateral. This led to a hockey stick in growth, and showed the importance of differentiation. We saw substantial inflows and demand for borrow as we accepted SOL as collateral, and capitalized on the growth in the Solana ecosystem. The High Yield pool reached a maximum of $160m TVL in October and for a time was yielding ~20% to lenders in a market where basis was paying ~10%.
In March we came up with the idea for Syrup.fi, an institutional lending product aimed at DeFi users and integrations. The same high quality institutional loans under the hood, but able to be integrated and used by DeFi protocols and offshore retail users. Syrup.fi was shipped lightning fast, from idea to launch in under three months. The first loans went out in June and Syrup.fi had a number of successful partnerships on its way to crossing $300m TVL and accounting for 50% of Maple’s overall TVL. This powered most of the Q3 TVL growth and gave us a better way to access the growing amount of DeFi capital.
As we closed in on the end of the year, the main focus became ensuring the success of the token migration from MPL to SYRUP. Token migrations are a difficult process and this one offered challenges to work through as a team. In November 2023, tokenholders voted to recapitalize the Maple DAO Treasury to ensure long-term sustainability and to provide the resources to execute on Maple’s ambitious vision. The delay in Coinbase listing SYRUP was a setback, but they have since added custody of SYRUP and we continue to engage in constructive conversations around listing support in 2025. There were a number of positives coming out of the migration, including the reintroduction of staking, with more than 60% of circulating SYRUP being staked, and 70% of circulating MPL that has been converted. SYRUP unites the Maple ecosystem, including Maple Institutional and Syrup.fi under a single governance token which will participate in the growth of the ecosystem.
2024 saw the end of the bear market and the entry into a new bull market. With this shift in sentiment and risk appetite, comes new competition. Animal spirits are back, and users are seeking higher yields and prefer to hold appreciating assets. Maple can’t sit still, we must bring new products to market which can address these needs. We are working on structured products which will deliver higher yields in a rising market, as well as yield products for large cap coins and altcoins so that users can get yield on appreciating assets. Finally, there will be more ecosystems and protocols of the L1/L2 variety that may look to borrow or lend to bootstrap their ecosystems. Its been over two years since someone attempted to tackle this problem with protocol loans.
We see multiple tailwinds converging in 2025 that benefit digital asset lending. These are i) institutional adoption; ii) DeFi growth; and iii) regulatory clarity. Entrants from Traditional Finance increasingly view digital asset lending as an attractive space. In July, Cantor Fitzgerald, which manages over $100b in Treasury assets for Tether announced a target of lending $2b against BTC. We expect this trend to continue and gain momentum, and aim to position Maple’s infrastructure and distribution as an attractive partner to offer curated credit opportunities to institutional allocators entering the space.
Private Credit is the fastest growing subsector in traditional finance, and is now a $1.5T market. It is on a secular growth trend as banks pull back from institutional lending due to regulatory capital costs, ceding ground to alternative lenders such as Ares and Apollo Global. Maple is the largest originator of tokenized private credit in the Real World Asset space, having done over $5.2b of tokenized institutional loans since inception and currently with more than $500m in Assets on the platform. We sit at the intersection of the twin tailwinds of Private Credit growth, and the tokenization of Real World Assets. Settling our loans on chain and powering our lending activity with stablecoins gives us faster settlement anywhere in the world, cheaper operations and programmability and automation that is lacking in traditional finance. These advantages assist our vision of transforming capital markets and fueling innovation with seamless, transparent, accessible institutional lending.
In 2025, Maple will grow by driving its two core products, Maple Institutional, with its curated credit opportunities for institutional allocators, and Syrup.fi which makes high quality institutional yield available to DeFi. Here are our four big targets for Maple in 2025:
- Maple’s TVL surpassing $4 billion;
- First TradFi partner to lend $100m+ through Maple Institutional;
- First $100m+ DeFi integration for Syrup.fi; and
- Protocol revenue crossing $25m+
We thank our customers, partners and SYRUP community for their support this year. We also couldn’t have achieved the transformation and milestones of this year without the dedication and hard work of the team. Their efforts have set Maple up to have its biggest year yet in 2025 and to capitalize on the enormous opportunity that lies ahead. In 2025 we look forward to unprecedented TVL growth as we march towards the goal of $100b of originations in 2030.
Sid and Joe
straight to your inbox