Decentralized lending platform for institutions – Maple Finance

Lending platforms lead the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector in terms of total value locked (TVL), with a figure of $56 billion as of May 2025. For comparison, the total TVL of liquid staking protocols is $51.9 billion. At the same time, the lending protocol segment alone accounts for nearly half of the entire DeFi sector's total value locked (TVL), which exceeds $119 billion.

The Maple Finance protocol, which is the focus of this article, ranks among the top ten DeFi lending platforms by total value locked.

What is Maple Finance?

Maple Finance is a blockchain-based lending platform designed for both individual and corporate clients. The protocol operates on Ethereum and Solana networks.

The key feature of this lending platform is the offering of overcollateralized loans to institutional borrowers, which feature fixed interest rates. The yield on loans via Maple Finance can range from 5% to 10% annually.

The platform itself launched in May 2021. The goal of Maple Finance was to solve the issues then plaguing the DeFi market, such as the lack of a scalable, secure, and open credit infrastructure.

Following the crypto market crash triggered by the collapse of the infamous Terra blockchain platform and the bankruptcies of major crypto players such as the FTX exchange and hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), Maple Finance's TVL plummeted to just $2 million by 2023, even though it had peaked above $80 million in April 2022.

According to DeFi Llama, as of May 2025, the total value locked in the Maple Finance protocol is $1.2 billion, placing it 8th among decentralized finance lending platforms. In just the past year, Maple Finance's TVL has grown roughly 18 times — from $66.5 million in May 2024.

How Maple Finance works

Borrowers on Maple Finance are companies. Each must undergo a compliance check with KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) requirements. Only after completing the Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) processes can companies access funding.

Lenders are institutional investors. Maple Finance streamlines the lending process: investors don't need to select specific companies to fund; instead, they simply contribute assets to liquidity pools, similar to classic lending platforms.

Advantages of Maple Finance

The first significant advantage of Maple Finance is its accessibility to institutional investors, as early lending platforms were primarily targeted at individual clients. Maple Finance began offering decentralized loans to companies in need of financing.

The second advantage is transparency and operational efficiency. Credit risk assessment and debt repayment are fully managed through autonomous smart contracts. According to the developers, this approach reduces operational costs in lending.

Finally, a third advantage of Maple Finance is its modular structure, which enables the rapid integration of new asset classes and the expansion of its ecosystem by adding support for additional blockchain networks.

The Maple Finance ecosystem

In addition to Maple Finance, the developers also launched a platform called Syrup.fi, which is geared toward individual users, much like platforms such as Aave or Compound.

Unlike Maple Finance, Syrup.fi does not require KYC/AML verification: users can immediately provide liquidity and take out loans on the platform.

Maple Finance token

In November 2024, the team launched its governance token, Maple Finance (SYRUP), on the Ethereum (ERC-20) and Base blockchains.

SYRUP holders can utilize their tokens to contribute to the development of the Maple Finance ecosystem and stake them to earn passive income. The SYRUP token is also utilized for yield farming, allowing holders to contribute assets to liquidity pools and earn income from lending to other users within the Maple Finance ecosystem.

A total of 1.1 billion SYRUP tokens were issued and are already circulating in the market. However, SYRUP is an inflationary token with no emission cap. This means an unlimited number of SYRUP tokens could be minted in the future, which may negatively affect the price in the long term.

However, even a general upward trend in the crypto market did not help the token rise in November–December 2024: immediately after being listed on exchanges, when its price reached $0.26, SYRUP's value dropped by more than half to $0.11 by the end of January 2025.

Nevertheless, following a new growth wave that began in April 2025, the price of SYRUP also started to rise, reaching a new all-time high of $0.46 in May. At the time of writing, the SYRUP price stands at $0.41, and the token has achieved a market capitalization of $456 million, placing it 132nd in the overall cryptocurrency ranking.