Maple launches on Solana, starting with $45M to fund ecosystem growth

Maple Finance
5 min readApr 25, 2022

Maple launches on Solana with X-Margin, who immediately issue $42M uncollateralized with capital provided by Circle, Coinshares and Solana natives.

Maple is proud to launch on Solana today, and begin to address financing needs within the ecosystem. With our launch partner X-Margin, and lenders Circle, Coinshares and Solana natives, we bring $40M in liquidity to the ecosystem at launch, and plan to grow this pool to $300M by EOY.

“Building the first multi-chain capital market solution has and will continue to attract high quality lenders and borrowers, create unprecedented growth opportunities for innovators building on Solana, and enable the entire industry to thrive.” Sidney Powell, CEO and Co-Founder of Maple.

Whilst Maple is the first multi–chain capital solution, we are also the first institutionally focused platform to offer uncollateralized borrowing on Solana. With key partners, X-Margin, Circle, Coinshare this is a key milestone in transforming capital markets through technology.

Individuals and institutions can deposit Solana USDC into the pool directly via the Maple Solana WebApp. Requests to borrow can be made here.

X-Margin is the first firm to act as a pool delegate and launch a lending business on Maple Solana. Attracting large deposits from Circle ($10M), Coinshares ($20M), and Solana natives ($10M), the X-Margin team will combine their privacy preserving credit platform and underwriting expertise, with Maple’s on-chain credit infrastructure to efficiently issue credit to crypto-blue chips.

“Maple’s multi-chain infrastructure continues to lead the way for institutional credit infrastructure in crypto. X-Margin’s privacy preserving credit platform is a natural fit for this, helping to scale a more data-driven and transparent credit market in DeFi and CeFi.” Darshan Vaidya, CEO of X-Margin.

To bring traditional capital markets on-chain, Maple has built with institutions to ensure the same rules and regulations apply in DeFi. For instance, across the protocol all borrowers must pass KYC-AML checks as well as credit assessment, so institutional lenders can be sure capital is issued to reputable firms.

“Circle deposited $10M Solana USDC to fund the future of the Solana ecosystem. Solana USDC already has extensive adoption with FTX, Serum, Raydium, and now Maple is bringing new utility to Solana USDC, as well as a new primitive to the ecosystem. We are proud to deepen our partnership with Maple and the Solana ecosystem at large.” Jeremy Fox-Geen, Chief Financial Officer, Circle.

Profitable and growing crypto blue-chips, Nascent, Framework, and Alameda Research comprize the first cohort of uncollateralized borrowers, after passing X-Margin’s rigorous due diligence process.

“Borrowing uncollateralized means we can optimize operating capital for our liquid strategies. We’ve been really impressed with X-Margin and Maple’s process and the teams bringing Maple Solana to market, and we’re proud to be the beneficiaries of this exciting launch” Josh Felker, Co-Founder, Nascent

The pool is open to deposits from all individuals and institutions with idle cash, up to an initial amount of $5M Solana USDC. X-Margin plan to grow the pool to $300M by the end of 2022.

Bringing Maple Solana to Mainnet

Maple exists to transform capital markets through technology and be the source of growth for the world’s most innovative companies. With exciting projects being built on Solana, we chose to join the ecosystem at its genesis, and have built quickly through the acquisition of Avari, a Solana native undercollateralized lending protocol, in January.

Now one team, we’ve moved with speed and diligence to reconfigure the smart contracts, maintaining parity across Solidity and Rust codebases, and have conducted two audits with Bramah Systems and Quantstamp. At launch, Maple Solana is a lighter weight but dark mode version of Maple with plans to upgrade the contracts to reach parity over the course of the year. Key distinctions between Maple Solana and Maple Ethereum at launch are no functionality for lenders to post pool cover and no dynamic collateralization so only 0% collateral can be posted. You can read more about the Solana contracts in our Gitbook here.

The Road Ahead

Our goal for Maple Solana is clear: bring Maple’s on-chain capital-market infrastructure to scale the Solana ecosystem.

“Over the next three months, we expect to bring over $300 million of liquidity to Solana. We will soon welcome another credit-expert to the platform, and share more details on how liquidity protocols are already using Maple’s infrastructure as a launchpad onto Solana. From a product perspective, we will bring the product to parity over the course of the year and make plans for the SYRUP token”. Quinn Barry, Head of Maple Solana

Along with launching separate Solana contracts, there will also be a separate governance token for Maple Solana, SYRUP, analogous to MPL on Ethereum. We shared more about SYRUP tokenomics in a medium post here, and plan to launch SYRUP in three to six months' time.

Lenders can deposit into the pool directly via the Maple Solana WebApp, requests to borrow can be made here.

Since Maple’s debut in May 2021, we have originated over $1.2 billion in loans and currently count over $900 million in TVL to the platform. Maple launched DeFi’s first permissioned institutional lending pool with BlockTower and Genesis, originated over $100 million in loans to Alameda Research, sister company to FTX, and established a partnership with crypto lending platform Celsius.

About Maple

Maple is a crypto-capital network operating across the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. Maple facilitates efficient credit flows by providing the technology for credit experts to build lending businesses. This in turn facilitates undercollateralized lending for institutional borrowers and income opportunities for lenders. Third-party credit experts harness Maple’s technology to operate fast-flowing lending businesses. Maple recognizes the multi-trillion dollar opportunity and is focussed on becoming a gateway to efficient credit for growing, innovative real world businesses. For more information visit: maple.finance.

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Maple Finance

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