Why “DeFi is dead” and what replaces it with Sidney Powell, CEO of Maple Finance

0:00 Kelp protocol was hacked, $232 million were stolen. What happened on that weekend? What the hackers did was they corrupted a bridge.

0:10 The hacker or the perpetrator took the extra minted rsETH, and they put it on Aave and then immediately borrowed ETH. The reason they did this is because we are the second-largest institutional lender on-chain.

0:23 We have over four billion in assets under management. The way Maple works is we do loans that are institutional in size, so anywhere from 10 million to 500 million.

0:33 But for Maple, we take the collateral and we put it in tri-party custody accounts.

0:37 But the way that we do it differently to standard DeFi protocol, there's 50 million Americans today who hold crypto of some kind or another, and those people will want other products, whether it's crypto-backed credit cards or crypto-backed mortgages.

0:49 I think over time you're gonna see more and more banking players get into the crypto space. Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights, today with Sydney Powell. Sydney, welcome to the show. Hi, Marc.

1:04 Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Yeah, it's great to have you here today, Sydney. In January, you told CoinDesk a high-profile on-chain credit default was coming in 2026.

1:15 Three months later, Aave is staring down up to $230 million in bad debt from the Kelp cascade.

1:22 Sydney, you co-founded and you are the CEO of Maple Finance, one of the largest institutional lending protocols in crypto, with over 10 billion US dollars in loans facilitated to date. So very great to have you here.

1:34 Lots of topics that we wanna talk about today. The first question I wanna ask you, Syd, is why is DeFi important? There's a lot to unpack in that.

1:43 My view is DeFi is important because it represents a fundamental upgrade to the financial system.

1:49 So we're all-- You know, I don't need to rehash some of the problems with traditional banking, whether it's the user experience, the $25 wire fees, the fact that it takes T+1 to settle things or, you know, multiple days to move things internationally.

2:02 Uh, my view is that the key advantage of using DeFi is speed, much lower cost to transact and release financial products. It's much more globally accessible. And so I think

2:17 DeFi has very obvious use cases for the unbanked.

2:21 Not everyone can get access to, to a credit card, uh, or a brokerage account in developing countries, so I think that is a very important constituency who, who benefits immensely from DeFi.

2:31 But I don't think the benefits of DeFi are limited to just developing markets.

2:36 I think within the US and within many developed economies, DeFi offers faster, cheaper, uh, more accessible products, and it dramatically speeds up the iteration on some of these products, whether it's trading, lending and borrowing, tokenization of assets.

2:55 And so I think, uh, it will, over time, eat the traditional financial system. But obviously, I'm, I'm a little bit biased, so I'm, I'm naturally gonna say that as a builder in the space.

3:04 In December, you declared DeFi is dead and that it's evolving into an on-chain finance. Can you explain us that a little bit? What did you mean by that?

3:13 It's a little bit of a, a tongue-in-cheek sort of provocative saying. Uh, but my view was in saying DeFi is dead, that DeFi is this kind of niche product category with an insular community. That concept is dead.

3:28 So the idea that you're building for a small cadre of, of people who are just, uh, true believers.

3:34 I think that as the product expands, it's not go- It's-- Over time, it won't be referred to as DeFi, it'll just be referred to as finance. And you're already starting to see, uh, that

3:46 traditional finance is taking notice of it. We've seen partnerships announced like Apollo working with Morpho, JPMorgan working with Coinbase.

3:55 Uh, we've seen BlackRock work with Securitize to tokenize its money market fund on-chain. So I think over time you are gonna see more, um, uh, interrelationships between DeFi and traditional finance.

4:08 And I think as DeFi matures, we won't just be calling it DeFi anymore. It'll increasingly just be referred to as, uh, as finance. So that's what I mean by that.

4:17 I think we have to now think as a space about building products that people want, that generate revenues, that are accessible to people who, you know, don't have to worry about managing 10 hardware wallets and can, can use it on their phone and can onboard and on-ramp from their traditional, you know, their tr-traditional financial products.

4:35 And just recently, uh, something big happened in DeFi, which was what happened with Kelp. So Kelp protocol was hacked, $232 million, uh, dollars were stolen.

4:49 The people who stole that Kelp token walked over to Aave and created a collateral to borrow against real ETH, and then basically walked away with real ETH, and Aave was left with that stolen, uh, money that wasn't worth anything anymore.

5:05 Can you unpack for us a little bit what happened on that weekend on Aave, and how do you look at this? What are your thoughts when you saw this?

5:15 For anyone who is not following the incident closely, uh, Kelp DAO was a staking protocol for ETH. So you put ETH in, you get back rsETH, which is a wrapped version of it that accrues yield from underlying ETH staking.

5:30 So the intent is that you have one ETH backing one rsETH. What the hackers did was they corrupted a bridge, then minted more rsETH than there was backing of it, so something to the tune of, like, 20% overall.

5:44 So you effectively now have about 80% asset backing for this, for this asset, so other things equal, any rsETH you hold should be worth 20% less. So that's gonna be very important as we get to, to what happened next.

5:57 Then as, as you pointed out, Marc, the, uh, the hacker or the perpetrator took the extra minted rsETH that's now worth less, and they put it on Aave and then- Immediately borrowed ETH.

6:10 So the reason they did this is because if they hadn't, then RSETH could have frozen their assets. So they're sitting on it, and then they can't do anything with it. They can't move it.

6:18 Uh, so they immediately then sought to borrow, uh, good collateral or, or good assets against it, which is ETH, which is not possible to be, to be frozen by, by any one person.

6:28 So they borrowed that from Aave, and this created a problem for Aave. Normally, in a normal, uh, state of affairs, what would happen is that you have an asset that's worth $100.

6:38 You've borrowed, let's say, $90 against it. As the value of your collateral ticks down from 100, it gets liquidated.

6:46 So it hits a threshold level, and then Aave starts selling it through liquidation bots and, and secondary markets. The risk herein, though, is that you had a jump to default risk.

6:56 So the asset was worth one minute $100, and then the next it was worth roughly $80.

7:02 So it bypassed the level at which it could have been liquidated without a loss, and so therefore you ended up with bad debt on lending protocols, the, the most notable being Aave.

7:12 So, uh, what then happened was you saw, uh, many other users of Aave start to pull liquid collateral from there, so they pulled stable coins. And then others who were a little bit more savvy borrowed more assets.

7:29 So if I give you $100 of collateral, Marc, and then borrow $80 from you, if you default, I have a problem. So I can either... There's two things I can do.

7:39 I can either try and withdraw my surplus collateral from you, or I can try and borrow more from you. Now, ordinarily, if, if you're having bad debt issues, you wouldn't do that for me.

7:49 But because Aave is an autonomous, uh, protocol or an immutable protocol, uh, users could do that.

7:56 So, um, what this meant was the utilization on Aave spiked to 100, which means now borrowers are paying 15, 16% interest on there.

8:05 So a lot of folks are underwater on their positions, and, uh, and there is this lingering concern of, of bad debt there. Um, for the record, you know, we, we have partnered with Aave. We think highly of the team there.

8:18 Uh, and so, you know, we hope this situation gets worked out. But I'm doing my best to try and explain it for the viewers at home. And what were your thoughts when you saw this happening?

8:27 Was this something that you thought is gonna happen anyway at some point, or were you surprised that we walk into a situation like that? I think it is foreseeable.

8:39 I don't wanna claim, you know, you mentioned I had that prediction at the start of the year that there'll be an on-chain default.

8:44 Uh, that prediction certainly wasn't intended to be leveled at Aave and, you know, indeed, I hope there are not, uh, on-chain defaults.

8:51 But what I meant to say, what I meant by it is that every time people get very, very certain that there is an ironclad way of protecting against credit risk and start to over-rely on that, that's when weaknesses show up.

9:06 And risk, as Howard Marks says, is simply that more things can happen than will happen. And, uh, I've s- I'd seen before a couple of years ago, there was a, a DeFi token called Curve that was being borrowed against.

9:19 It also had illiquidity issues on DeFi, and, and there was a risk of some bad debt coming through protocols.

9:24 Now, the DeFi lending protocols a couple of years ago navigated that quite well, and the owner of the token managed to, to OTC sell or over-the-counter sell his position in chunks, so he never, he never got liquidated.

9:37 But the risk still stands that when you have an automated market which liquidates collateral, you still have this jump to default risk, which is the risk that an asset is worth 100 bucks, uh, one minute and then is worth 80 or, or some other lesser amount the next.

9:54 And that's something that you, you can't...

9:56 DeFi is not really structured to protect against because, because it's non-recourse, because there are no cash flow waterfalls typically, um, it leaves out these kind of messy gray areas.

10:07 And so I've, I've always viewed that this is a risk in DeFi. It's just something that hadn't really manifested yet for a lot of protocols. Um, but it, it is a foreseeable risk in traditional finance.

10:19 If you lend against a house or some other piece of collateral that's not very liquid, you do take the risk that, you know, at the point at which you need to foreclose on it, it's worth less than, than what you need to pay yourself back as a lender.

10:31 For all those executives sitting in banks and financial institutions that are now looking at these products and are looking at DeFi as a very, very interesting new way of creating financial products, how do those people need to think about this latest incident with Aave?

10:50 Is this something that we can expect more, or is this something that's probably gonna be solved in a couple of months? There's a few different outcomes or, or a way it can play out.

11:00 So Aave at the moment is considering two different proposals for how to deal with bad debt. Uh, so under one proposal, there's about 120 or 130 million of bad debt, and that is socializing it to all of the Aave

11:18 markets across each chain, in particular the wrapped ETH reserves. The other one is, uh, more circumscribed, and the bad debt would be socialized only to the L2 instances of Aave.

11:32 So, uh, that one carries a higher price tag of, of bad debt, uh, into the between 200 and 250 million range. So I think that's, that still needs to get worked out.

11:42 Uh, we also do need to see, uh, what the response is from Kelp, so the protocol that got hacked, and, uh, LayerZero, the bridge that was involved in the hack. It's still very uncertain at this stage.

11:54 I think the best outcome and what folks in the DeFi space are hoping for is that, uh, there is a bit of a white knight to come in and, and plug the hole. But it raises questions that I think DeFi will need to solve.

12:05 So some of these are, should protocols have a first loss reserve and, and, and how big does that first loss reserve need to get sized?

12:13 This is what you would see in traditional finance is if you're a senior lender, there's a first loss reserve or first loss credit beneath you.

12:20 And then the, the second one is when it comes to permissionless protocols- How does the cash flow allocation or, or cash flow waterfall work? Who takes the loss first? Who takes it second?

12:31 And how is that decided impartially? Because when you have DAO governance involved, the DAO governance kind of reflects, in a way, the equity holders.

12:41 So equity is, in a bad debt scenario, equity is always adverse to creditors. So if you don't wanna give equity all of the say because they would just try and foist the loss on, on creditors, and vice versa.

12:54 So how do you decide this in an impartial way? In traditional finance, we have the court system, we have arbitration procedures, and doc- documents would typically allocate who takes the loss.

13:04 So I don't think this is gonna stop traditional finance from working with DeFi.

13:08 I think it signals that we in the DeFi space have, uh, some problems that we need to solve, um, particularly how it- those two points I mentioned. So who arbitrates a dispute?

13:19 Um, how are, you know, losses or, or the cash flow waterfalls allocated? And then how is, like, first loss provisioned for in case of bad debt?

13:29 'Cause as we've seen, it's not good enough to just assume you're never gonna have bad debt. More things can happen than will happen. Another point might be what types of collateral you accept, right?

13:41 And with Aave, that's governance-voted. Let me know how you do it with Maple Finance. That's working differently, right?

13:47 So maybe you can expand a little bit on Maple Finance and how does that compare to Aave, and what is different in how you do it? I'd be remiss, Marc, if I didn't give Maple a plug.

13:58 So we are the second-largest, uh, institutional lender on chain, so we have over $4 billion in assets under management.

14:07 The way Maple works is we do loans that are institutional in size, so anywhere from $10 million to $500 million. We lend in stablecoins.

14:15 We lend to institutions, so think miners, uh, crypto miners, prime brokers, asset managers, trading firms, exchanges, and, um, and family offices. And in each case, we take digital assets as collateral.

14:28 So for the most part, we're taking Bitcoin, but we also look at Eth, Solana, XRP.

14:34 But the way that we do it differently to DeFi, a standard DeFi protocol, is that in our case, so for Maple, we take the collateral, and we put it in usually tri-party custody accounts.

14:45 So it means that it's segregated, so a borrower's collateral is, is not co-mingled in smart contracts.

14:51 The fact that it's not on smart contracts makes it less vulnerable to a hack, so it's in, you know, qualified custodians like Anchorage or BitGo or Azari or Coinbase Custody.

15:01 And, uh, every loan has segregated collateral. So I think that brings down the risk surface area there. And for our loans, we also put in place legal recourse to the borrower.

15:13 So even if something happened to the collateral, if there was a shortfall, we still have the ability to pursue them through the legal system, and these are all documented as enforceable loans.

15:22 So we have, you know, very clear rights and, and, um, the way that the losses are allocated is, is very clear. So this is different to DeFi.

15:30 So I view what we've tried to do is cater to institutional clients and kinda bring more curation into the picture. When you started with Maple, Aave was already around, and you probably used Aave. You were aware of Aave.

15:46 What made you do it differently than how they do it? So when we launched Aave, they were about 12 months into their transformation from EthLend to Aave, which ended up being immensely successful.

15:59 So I've used Aave a number of times. I am a big fan of the protocol. I was, also used Morpho and Sky as well, which used to be MakerDAO. So I've used, I've used pretty much all of the lending, the DeFi lending protocols.

16:11 They had a real lock on the overcollateralized market, and it's worth noting when we came in, it wasn't just them.

16:16 We also had, uh, competition from the, the centralized finance or CeFi lenders, so Celsius, BlockFi, or Genesis.

16:24 We started with a focus on institutions, but we were doing unsecured working capital loans at the time, so higher risk, higher return type lending because we had to get in and find a niche.

16:36 Over time, what happened was after 2022, a lot of that competition faded because those, uh, competitors in the CeFi space wound up. So we took a contrarian view at the time.

16:47 Everybody was saying crypto lending was done, but we took the contrarian view that, "No, no, no, this is literally the oldest profession in finance, lending, and what are the odds it's not gonna be around in the next couple of years?"

16:58 So we oriented ourselves to do the collateralized lending, uh, but in a hybrid model. So, uh, collateral is off-chain, held at custodians. The loans are all on-chain tokenized, and we raise funds from, from DeFi.

17:12 So we've, we've been doing that since 2023. We've done over $21 billion worth of loans, uh, $15 under that new model, and we've had zero credit losses on the overcollateralized lending since then.

17:25 In DeFi that says permissionless collateral acceptance is the point. Anything less is just a bank with extra steps. How would you respond to that? There's a couple of in- inherent weaknesses in that.

17:35 So I do see a place for permissionless collateral acceptance. I think it is, you know, the, the advantage of not having to onboard is, uh, a terrific user experience.

17:45 However, uh, there is the inbuilt risk here that should be priced in, which is if the collateral deposit is permissionless, you have no recourse to the borrower, and you have this jump to default risk.

17:57 It's fantastic if you can catch the collateral before it drops in value, but here you've seen exactly the consequences of permissionless collateral, which is it went from being, um, more than sufficient to cover the, the loan balances outstanding to less than in the space of a few minutes, and you have no recourse against those borrowers because it was permissionlessly deposited.

18:19 You don't have a contract with them. You don't know who they are. They've taken their money and gone. So that's the risk, is that if anything goes wrong with your collateral, you have no fail-safes for it.

18:30 So, uh, that's the trade-off. Now, I recognize that having to sign up with a custodian to deposit your collateral is, is not super appealing to everyone.

18:40 However, for the institutions we deal with, they don't want to stick it in smart contracts. So, and they have to know all their counterparties.

18:48 So they don't mind onboarding, and in exchange, what we can give them is larger loan sizes, competitive rates, and that's the, that's the trade-off.

18:57 I think you're working with an over-collateralization ratio of 120 to 170%. Is this correct? Typically, a standard loan term for us, Marc, would be something like a 70% loan-to-value ratio. So what's that?

19:09 It's about 140 to, to 145%. We would do a liquidation level typically at 80, so you're looking at around the kinda 120, 125%. And it varies. So for Bitcoin, we'll give the best terms because it's very liquid collateral.

19:24 Trades billions of dollars a day. For Solana, for XRP, uh, we might use a higher, a tighter haircut, uh, just because there's not as much trading volume day to day, so, uh, we have a little bit more risk of slippage.

19:37 But also, the, because we negotiate all of our loan terms with our borrowers, which is another reason that institutions work with us, uh, we can take more collateral and give a lower rate.

19:49 We can take a little bit less collateral and give a higher rate. So we have a, the ability to do bespoke terms, and that's, uh, another reason that our product appeals to institutions.

19:57 Speaking of appealing to institutions, uh, Cantor Fitzgerald gave you one of the first tranches of their two billion Bitcoin lending program in May 2025, uh, I think alongside FalconX.

20:08 Can you unpack us a little bit what that product is, how that came about? Yeah, for sure. We have a fantastic relationship with the Cantor team. We think very highly of the guys over there.

20:18 They're obviously a, a very well-established, um, traditional finance player, and I think it was a very positive signal to the space.

20:26 They have moved into the Bitcoin-backed lending arena, and also using stablecoins, uh, for these loans. So, uh, the, the program with them was that Maple borrowed.

20:37 So we borrowed to use the capital and the proceeds of the loan in our own lending business. Uh, and, uh, and we pledged them Bitcoin to, to borrow, uh, tho- those funds.

20:48 So that relationship is, uh, you know, c- continues to go strong. We're looking at other, you know, other types of, uh, of things we can do with Cantor.

20:57 And, uh, and obviously I think, you know, the fact that they were willing to come in in size and, and start a, you know, or commit up to two billion to a lending program signals that traditional institutions see the growth of crypto-backed lending.

21:11 And they, they see that, you know, there's 50 million Americans today who hold, who hold crypto of some kind or another.

21:17 And, uh, that, you know, that number is only gonna grow, and those people will want other products, whether it's crypto-backed credit cards or crypto-backed mortgages.

21:25 And so I think over time, you're gonna see more and more banking players get into the crypto space. We have a terrific relationship with Cantor and, uh, and look forward to continuing to grow that. It's not only Cantor.

21:35 P- pretty much every big US bank is now looking into stablecoins or, or tokenization, or has already tokenized products, and they're obviously also looking into how they can start plugging all of this into DeFi and start creating really interesting products out of that.

21:54 When you look at the DeFi space in general, outside of lending and borrowing, where do you see the biggest potential? What excites you most?

22:04 I always see four or five trends come up when I hear institutions talk about what they're most excited about in DeFi.

22:10 There's lending and borrowing, stablecoins, uh, tokenization of funds or real estate or these other illiquid assets. Uh, and then the other two are prediction markets and perps or perpetual futures swaps.

22:25 I think each of those has already tremendous market fit, and this is what I'm seeing traditional finance players get most animated about. You've seen ICE Exchange invested in Polymarket.

22:38 Uh, CME is, is looking at introducing perpetual swaps. Um, we've seen, uh, some of the traditional exchanges look at having prediction markets on there, particularly following that Polymarket investment.

22:50 And then we've seen, uh, a number of banks say that they are launching their own stablecoins because what they need to do is kinda combat deposit flight as folks exit checking accounts and move their, their assets over to, to stablecoins.

23:03 And then borrowing and lending. You know, we've already seen JPMorgan signal that they would potentially look at lending against Bitcoin.

23:09 I think that trend is gonna be inevitable because, as you pointed out, Marc, once a traditional bank offers crypto custody to their clients, then their clients wanna be able to trade from custody.

23:19 So then they want trading plus custody, and then once they can trade, they want, uh, leverage against the digital assets, and that's where a player like us comes in.

23:28 So we've talked with a number of banks, so commercial banks, prime brokers, uh, investment banks about whether we could be a silent capital partner and enable their customers to keep crypto custodied with them,

23:43 uh, while we lend to their clients because the bank doesn't always wanna hold crypto loan exposure on its balance sheet.

23:51 And the reason for that, and the reason why we aren't as worried about competition there, is because they have very punitive capital treatment of crypto on their balance sheet.

24:00 So it's actually much better for the banks to look to work with a big player like us. We have a large balance sheet to lend.

24:05 We're very comfortable lending against Bitcoin and other large cap assets, and we can offer very competitive rates to their clients.

24:11 So I've spoken with a number of prime brokers and investment banks around whether we could partner with them to lend to their clients so that their clients can trade digital assets and equities all in the same accounts with them.

24:23 You obviously have a mix between a permissioned and permissionless model. You KYC your b- borrowers. Um, then we have on the other side protocols like Aave who are, uh, permissionless.

24:36 Do you think it's gonna be a mix of both worlds going forward as soon as these big institutions start entering DeFi more aggressively, or do you think it's gonna move towards a kind of a combination of what you have, permissioned and permissionless?

24:50 It's always kind of tough to predict, predict the future in a space that moves this quickly. I would say you're actually gonna s- continue to see both approaches.

24:57 So I think, uh, we're already starting to see kind of credible, um, case law that if you have an immutable protocol that, uh, the central team does not have, or the, the, the developers don't have direct control over, and the- and therefore it has a degree of decentralization, the way I've seen kind of case law develop and, and guidance from regulators develop is that that would be okay and carved out.

25:23 So that would cover your permissionless architecture, whether it's a Uniswap or an Aave or a Morpho or a, a Sky or, or MakerDAO. And, um, and so I think you're gonna continue to have that.

25:36 But you will also in tandem need these kind of permissioned or semi-permissioned protocols. So we kind of fall into that category. We have a permissionless pool.

25:45 We also have a permissioned pool that only accepts accredited investors. And you've seen Aave has, uh, Horizon.

25:53 We've seen other kind of permissioned instances of DeFi protocols, and I think those are gonna be preferred for the direct access points for regulated asset managers, for neobanks that have retail customers because the regulators are gonna wanna see an extra degree of protection.

26:11 So I think the two can work hand-in-hand.

26:12 We work very well with Aave and Morpho and, uh, and Kamino and, and Jupiter and, um, but it's nice for us to have that permissionless architecture to, to lean on, whether it's the Aave Lending Protocol or Kamino or the secondary markets from Uniswap.

26:29 I think that the two are symbiotic, and, um, the composability is one of the most important features of DeFi for me.

26:37 I think Maple's deposit base grew so significantly, you know, 8 or 9X over 2025 because we had composable syrup USDC and syrup USDT tokens. So I think it would be kneecapping the space if, uh, if we lost that.

26:51 One of the things that's also always important with these developments is what happens on the regulatory front, right?

26:57 And DeFi has been left out so far from these big regulatory changes or landmarks laws like we saw with the Genius Act and now with the Clarity Act.

27:08 What are some things that you are looking at from y- from Maple's perspective that would impact your trajectory or how you think about the space, particularly here in the US?

27:18 I think here in the US, we, you know, we were all kind of waiting for, uh, the, the Clarity Act. Uh, it seems, you know, the odds have kind of swung a little bit against it.

27:26 I think the Genius Act was a great step forward.

27:29 It, uh, I think it made traditional finance much more comfortable handling and using stablecoins now that they know, you know, that there's regulation around the asset backing.

27:38 Uh, I think on the Clarity Act side, the key thing, you know, for folks like us who, who kind of sit in between fully DeFi or fully permissionless and, and kind of a hybrid model is: Who can you offer the products to in the US?

27:50 I think the big blocker is that a lot of DeFi products today have to block US users, uh, out of concerns over the regulation.

27:58 To the extent that the Clarity Act or the new framework in the US can offer regulatory sandboxes or innovation sandboxes where we can offer products to US users, but they are safer or they have certain disclosures or risk disclosures around them and transparency as to the backing of the assets, the treasuries of these protocols, and, you know, indeed to the point of what happened over the weekend, the, the cash flow waterfall or, or prioritization in the event of, of bad debt, um, I think that would be tremendously helpful.

28:29 But I'm most excited about the prospect of US users being able to, uh, to use DeFi products in future. Sid, you're originally from Australia. You also have, uh, clients all around the world.

28:41 Is there some-- Are there differences that you notice, uh, when you deal with European clients versus US clients versus Australian clients? Uh, how big is the institutional appetite across these regions?

28:54 The institutional appetite varies. So I would say the US entities have been a little bit, you know, kind of more forward or earlier users of DeFi. Then same in London, maybe mainland Europe, they were less so.

29:09 And, uh, and then, you know, it heats up again when you get to Dubai. There's a lot of, uh, you know, there's a lot of institutional users who relocated there. And then Singapore and Hong Kong.

29:18 Users out of Hong Kong and China tend to be a little bit more conservative. I think they like the idea of the tokenized money market funds, and they have a bit of a barbelled approach to risk.

29:28 They either want super high-risk venture bets or they want extremely conservative, you know, real estate-type risk.

29:35 What I would say as well is, um, you know, there's a difference in, in the retail and high net worth users between markets. I think I found, you know, we have a number of European clients who had moved to Dubai.

29:48 They are very interested in the yield products out there. They tend to be conservative. They're, they're more, you know, if they were equities investors, they'd be focused on dividends.

29:56 They like cash flows, steady income streams. Um, in the US, uh, you know, they, they tend to be more about capital appreciation.

30:04 They're willing to take on a little bit more risk and, uh, there's not as much emphasis on, you know, a steady stream of cash flows. They, they sort of prefer the higher yields. So it varies.

30:13 I think the key is that DeFi above all else gives you the ability to kind of cater to all of these clients.

30:20 So it is truly, you know, DeFi is truly a, a global set of financial products and, um, the advantage for a player like us is that we are smaller. We're a startup. We have limited resources.

30:31 But with DeFi, you can reach clients around the world. So we have some, some of Maple's borrowers are in, you know, South Korea or Singapore. We have other clients You know, in the US, London, Dubai.

30:44 So, you know, it is truly a global, a global set of products. And looking forward for next six to 12 months, what are some of the features or things you're most excited about when it comes to Maple Finance?

30:56 We do wanna climb the ranking on the, uh, on the, the institutional lender side. So we are number two. We, we would love to shoot for that number one spot.

31:03 Uh, but the other things I'm excited about, so we are starting to look at things like fintech allocations. So I think this is very exciting because it represents, you know, the, the broadening of the wedge.

31:17 So we started with only doing over-collateralized crypto-backed loans.

31:20 Over the course of this year, we're looking at starting to work with some fintechs to originate loans to them, and I think this is the progressive expansion of DeFi.

31:29 Coming full circle to what you said earlier about DeFi being dead, well it's, you know, that is the expansion of DeFi to serve web to fintechs and neobanks, and eventually traditional finance players.

31:41 So I'm very excited about that. And, um, we actually have a couple of partnerships cooking with traditional players as well. So this is, um, could look like tokenization of their assets, their, their funds and things.

31:53 But the other thing we are working on is we, we are trying to get Maple's, um, DeFi products, so Syrup USDC and Syrup USCT, integrated with neobanks and some of these centralized exchange earn programs.

32:05 So we wanna give their users the ability to get stable, predictable, uh, stable coin yield, which comes from, you know, comes from our over-collateralized lending.

32:15 And also outside of Maple Finance, if you can give our listeners a taste or a hint of where they need to look at some project development that is super exciting from your perspective that you think people should pay attention to.

32:32 There's a number, um, of teams that we work very closely with that I think are doing very cool things. So, uh, in, in the Sky ecosystem, you know, you have Grove, Obex, and Spark.

32:43 Um, I find that ecosystem very interesting because it's almost this concept of like a central bank and then commercial banks, uh, or, or a fund-to-fund type setup.

32:54 Uh, so we work closely with the Spark team, the Grove team, and the Obex team, so I, I would encourage folks to look at them. You know, we, we do work closely with Aave and Morpho in the lending space.

33:05 You know, I, I continue to think the, the lending space is the most exciting part of DeFi. And, uh, and then the other thing we've been looking at is accepting more of the, uh, more stable coins.

33:15 So, you know, we work with PayPal, we're working with Anchorage, Paxos, the USDG Consortium, and, um, and so we're l- we're looking to do more with those partnerships.

33:26 So, uh, and then the, the other thing I've, I've seen is outside of Maple and lending, I pay attention to the prediction market space.

33:32 I've seen that there are new hedge funds and people taking the vault product, which has been very successful in lending, and looking to apply it to prediction markets to generate yield.

33:43 So that's something that's, uh, that's just more of a hobby I pay attention to on the side. Sid, we're almost at the end of the show. Uh, we usually do a quick lightning round, short questions, short answers.

33:54 The first one is Bitcoin or Ethereum? For me, it's Bitcoin. Uh, Bitcoin's our most popular form of collateral. Uh, and I think its Lindy effect gives it a lot of institutional adoption and mileage. So for me, Bitcoin.

34:06 The most overrated narrative in crypto in 2026? I think at the moment, prediction market's probably overrated.

34:12 I think, you know, the, the platforms have had tremendous traction so far, but I think, you know, the, the idea that essentially gambling on everything is gonna be $100 billion-plus industry is a little bit depressing and nihilistic.

34:25 So for me, prediction markets. The most underrated narrative?

34:29 I wouldn't say perps are underrated because we've seen, we've seen a lot of traction around them for, you know, hyper liquid being able to trade oil over the weekends.

34:37 Lending overall is still being slept on by a lot of people. Um, I think lending on chain is gonna be huge.

34:43 I think 10 years from now, all major capital transaction, capital markets transactions and bonds will settle in stable coins. So for me, lending. The first time you bought Bitcoin? First time I bought Bitcoin early 2018.

34:55 As in, I, I was inside a bank from 2014 hearing about it back then from other grads on the program. I wish I'd listened to them.

35:02 Instead, I, uh, I repeated the Warren Buffett quote about it being rat poison to them back in 2014. Boy was, uh, boy was I smart. One thing you learned in securitization that you wish every DeFi founder knew?

35:14 I can give two answers to that, actually. Uh, but they're, they're interrelated.

35:17 So one is the concept of first loss capital, who takes the default first when something goes wrong, and securitization is exactly set up to solve that. And then the other thing is the concept of the cash flow waterfall.

35:29 So cash flows, you know, you can pay senior first, then mezz, then junior. But I think between them, those two concepts help mitigate a lot of the risks that we see in DeFi today.

35:40 And last one, one belief you held strongly five years ago that you n- no longer hold.

35:45 Five years ago, I, I believed that everything needed to be decentralized and, uh, that you needed as little intervention of people as possible.

35:53 Now I recognize that there is an advantage to curation and having people in risk management. It's really good for dealing with situations like, uh, like, you know, like what happened over the weekend.

36:04 So more things can happen than will happen, and having some level of, of oversight or expert involvement, I think helps mitigate it when, when you, you run into these kind of gray areas. That's great.

36:15 Sid, we're at the end of the show. Thank you so much for coming. Where can people learn more about you, about Maple Finance? Thank you very much for having me. Uh, this was a pleasure.

36:22 So we are, our website is maple.finance. Uh, we are very active on X, @MapleFinance, one word, and I am @SyrupSid, one word. So would love to hear from anyone who's interested in learning more about us.

36:36 And we'll link that in the show notes as well. I wish you all the best with Maple and those new integrations and features that are coming up. Looking forward to that, and, uh, talk soon. My pleasure. Thanks, Marc.

36:46 Take care. You obviously like this video enough that you got to the end. Listen, do me a favor, hit that like and subscribe button because I think you'll like it.

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37:12 See you next time.