Maple Finance Acquires Avari For Rapid Launch onto Solana

Maple Finance
4 min readJan 20, 2022

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We’re excited to announce our acquisition of Avari, an undercollateralized lending protocol built on Solana and founded by Stanford engineers. The acquisition means Maple will be the first protocol to bring undercollateralized lending to Solana, and the first undercollateralized lending protocol to have a multi-chain presence. The Solana launch is planned for Q1 2022.

“We aim to make Maple the dominant corporate credit infrastructure in crypto by removing all frictions and expanding across multiple chains. The acquisition of the Avari team out of Stanford means we can expand to Solana in Q1 2022, and begin to welcome both smaller participants and high-quality players from the Solana ecosystem such as DAOs, protocols and institutional investors to our platform. This provides the potential to add billions of dollars in untapped value to the Maple ecosystem,” says Sidney Powell, CEO and Co-Founder, Maple Finance.

Maple Finance launched in May 2021 and we are proud to have facilitated more than $540 million in loans across four pools, one of them being a dedicated facility for Alameda Research with a target size of $1 billion. Undercollateralized lending in crypto is still comparatively small, representing less than 1% of the outstanding debt market. We are still at the beginning of the s-curve and are working hard to create the most frictionless and efficient capital infrastructructure so Maple will be the dominant player.

The acquisition of Avari represents the beginning of an ambitious roadmap for 2022 and beyond. We plan to reach $5 billion in TVL by the end of 2022 by creating a frictionless infrastructure for people to run lending businesses and access capital on their terms and welcoming new users from new markets and ecosystems, such as Solana.

“Maple has achieved massive adoption on Ethereum, and we have equally ambitious goals for Maple Solana. The combination of the Avari engineering team and Maple’s proven track record is the perfect opportunity to build the highest TVL undercollateralized lending protocol in DeFi. Joining Maple allows us to scale 10x faster”, says Quinn Barry, CEO and Co-Founder, Avari.

Avari founders Quinn Barry and Jeff Hu will join Maple Finance as Heads of Maple Solana, and will lead the project’s growth internally. Over the last few months the small team developed an impressive MVP for undercollateralized lending on Solana. Now, together with the Maple team, the codebase is being merged to build V1 of Maple on Solana. Quinn and Jeff are hiring multiple Rust Developers to keep up the pace and build out V2 over time. Join us: https://jobs.lever.co/maple-finance

Why Solana?

Avari is deeply embedded in the Solana ecosystem, and Maple will leverage Avari’s relationships to expand its addressable market. The most exciting element of Solana’s ecosystem is its scalability.

We anticipate that Solana DAOs will represent the largest lenders to Maple Solana pools, and Maple is already in conversation with a number of top Solana players to be launch partners. If you’re interested in joining Maple on Solana, let us know here!

High gas fees on Ethereum limit Maple’s depositors to large players in the space; crypto-native holders; DAO treasuries, institutions, and whales. On Solana, there are virtually no transaction costs. Maple Solana will provide the on-ramp to empower smaller participants to access our liquidity pools.

We are also impressed by the infrastructure built in the Solana ecosystem and excited to build in partnership with wallets, exchanges, and tools in Solana DeFi. Expect to hear more from us on Solana partnerships soon!

Future tokenomics

The future is multi-chain so we are taking a long-term view in establishing what Maple governance and tokenomics look like in a multi-chain world. With opportunity comes questions around whether we have multiple tokens and how this scales, if separate tokens means dilution of MPL, how activities on multiple chains will be governed and how our community is honoured.

There is an active community discussion on Discord, and we have opened a Community forum too. As well as that we are in consultation with investors, partners and advisors, and plan to release a blog post and host an AMA next week to detail the state of play and road ahead on this important topic.

We are confident that being the first undercollateralized lending protocol on Solana, with an expert team, will add great value to MPL holders now and into the future and are committed to ensuring existing MPL holders will be rewarded for their governance and support as we scale.

Join our journey:

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Maple Finance

Maple Finance is an institutional capital marketplace powered by blockchain technology.