In December we shipped Maple 2.0 - our largest engineering project to date. Now that our smart contracts and UI are modular, we can move more nimbly and bring new features to market more quickly.

Maple 2.0 marked the beginning of our product maturation, and our focus has shifted from MVP to refining and diversifying our offering. Across teams, the objective for 2023 is to “build on-chain capital markets infrastructure that provides a diversified set of lending opportunities through strong and reputable Delegates”.

As an financial infrastructure provider, the catalyst to Maple’s scalability is in onboarding more Delegates to the protocol. We know that strong and reputable Delegates require three things: the ability to manage risk, access to capital, and the right tools to operate an efficient and profitable lending business. Meeting these requirements is our focus for the first half of the year.

We arrived at the below features through consultation and collaboration with current and prospective partners. If you would like to use Maple, but don’t see what you need to get started, please drop a note here.

Managing risks with a new suite of loan products

By the end of the half, Delegates will have access to new loan products that mitigate concentration and default risks.

1) Open Term Loans will allow Delegates to call loans at anytime, and more effectively manage concentration risk and liquidity required to process withdrawals.

2) Active Collateral Management will allow Delegates to require the value of collateral to stay above a specific threshold, and reduce loss of capital in the event of a default.

3) Principal Reduction at Refinancing will allow Delegates to propose refinancing in a situation where a borrower’s creditworthiness has weakened in an effort to reduce loss of capital should a default occur, and more effectively manage concentration risk.

Attracting capital by connecting with more customers

By the end of the half, Delegates will connect with more customers and sources of capital, driving deposit volume and diversity.

1) Maple’s API/SDK will leverage the new smart contract architecture and enable Delegates to connect directly where people and institutions hold their capital to their pools, driving more liquidity into the pool and DeFi at large.

2) Updated Borrower Information Page will allow Delegates to share more information on borrower type, concentration, and credit performance, providing all the information Lenders need to make a lending decision.

Optimizing operations with new back-office tools

Soon more of the lending and account management process will be automated for Delegates, saving time and money for all protocol participants.

1) Automated Interest Statements will be introduced, removing the burden on Delegates and improving the customer experience with accounts downloadable at any time.

2) Updated Pool Delegate and Borrower Dashboards will be introduced so Delegates have more options, information at their fingertips, and ultimately maximum control over their pools.

Driving down the cost of capital has long been the financial markets’ north star. Yet, traditional finance systems are fragmented, opaque, and inefficient.

On top of that there are large teams and countless intermediaries extracting value and clipping fees running, controlling, and validating untrustable systems.

Institutional DeFi has the potential to revolutionize the world of finance. Distributed ledger and blockchain technologies are efficient by nature; disintermediated, built on logic, deterministic, coordinated. Our efforts this year will see us make further advances in removing back and middle office services through programmable and immutable smart-contracts. Financial infrastructure and enterprise software might not be as exciting to some, but its marginal efficiencies will eventually bring crypto to every household in the world.

We will soon begin to publish monthly Product Release Notes, if you’re interested in staying up to date on product news sign up to our newsletter here.