🥛 Maple grew 5x in 5 months 🍁

GM, this is Milk Road PRO, your very own ‘crypto thermometer’ (we help you take the temperature of up and coming projects.)

Today, we're diving into another exciting project: Maple.

It all started with this eye-catching TVL chart that grabbed our attention.

In 2025, Maple’s TVL (Total Value Locked) exploded—growing nearly 5x and hitting a massive $1.7 billion. That kind of momentum doesn't happen by accident.

Usually, there are two main reasons behind such a rapid rise:

1. A new feature or upgrade goes live

2. An incentive program kicks off, like rewards or yield farming

In Maple's case, it looks like both are in play. 

They were the first to really open up lending and crypto-backed borrowing for institutional players. Think of them as Aave but for institutions. 

And to supercharge growth, they started rewarding liquidity providers aka lenders with $SYRUP tokens.

It’s a powerful combo, but the real test is whether they can also attract enough actual borrowers.

Let’s look at the data to find out.

So here’s what the numbers show: institutions have locked in $614 million as collateral to only borrow $377 million.

At first glance, that might seem underwhelming. With billions in TVL, lending out just $377 million feels a bit low. 

But numbers don’t always tell the full story at face value. So let’s look at this data from another angle.

When we zoom out and look at total borrowing over time, the picture gets a lot more exciting. At the start of the year, there were just $36 million in active loans. 

Fast forward five months, and that number has jumped 10x. That’s serious growth.

Liquidity providers motivated by token rewards are bringing in the capital and that liquidity is actually being used by institutions for borrowing. 💪

And here’s one more thing you need to be aware of: 

That total value of outstanding loans above only covers one of the three products Maple offers today. So we’re not even seeing the full picture yet.

But they clearly have enough momentum to start the flywheel of liquidity spinning.

In finance, there’s a saying: liquidity begets liquidity. It basically means that liquidity attracts more liquidity and once that starts, it can keep building on itself. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle.

And this feels like a textbook example. We’re big fans of projects that manage to kick off this kind of flywheel. 

But before we invest in them, we want to dive deeper and really understand what Maple and their token $SYRUP is all about.

• Does the team have what it takes to build something meaningful?

• What’s their unique edge that sets them apart?

• Can they defend their position as competition heats up?

• Are they actually making money from their products?

• And most importantly—does their current valuation make sense?

We're going to stick to our usual process, which we call the MR Playbook. You can check out more details about it here.

If you're already familiar with how it works, let's dive right in.

TEAM

Maple Finance was founded in 2019 and officially launched in 2021 by Sidney Powell and Joe Flanagan.

• Sidney Powell, now CEO, is the visionary behind Maple. With a background in institutional banking and credit markets, he saw how outdated and inefficient traditional lending had become. He uses blockchain technology to build a faster, more transparent alternative. 

As he puts it: “I used to be in banking in Australia, helping lending companies borrow so they could grow their business.”

👉 That’s a big advantage because as we’ll see later, it’s exactly what Maple is doing right now.

• Joe Flanagan brings the operational muscle to Maple. With a solid background in finance and tech, he’s held key roles like CFO at Axesstoday and Managing Director at Clover Advisory, where he specialized in managing complex financial systems and operations.

Both founders bring strong experience to the table, and the fact that they’ve been working on this product since 2019 speaks volumes. 

They’re not chasing quick wins and there's no sign they’ll slow down. They’ve seen how outdated traditional finance is, and they seem to be committed to shaking things up. 

We see great founders' market fit, which definitely makes us want to dig deeper into their product.

We usually continue from here by talking about the total addressable market (TAM), but today we're switching things up. It's often tough to look at their TAM without first knowing what the product actually is. 

So let's mix it up a bit and start by diving into the product itself.

PRODUCT

Actually, it’s not just one product — they’ve got three:

1/ Maple Institutional – a permissioned platform for lending and borrowing, mainly for KYCed institutions.

2/ Syrup finance – permissionless lending combined with permissioned borrowing platform (plus yield bearing stablecoin).

3/ BTC Yield – lenders can earn rewards on their Bitcoin.

Before we can understand if the token is a good investment, we need to wrap our heads around their business and the different products they offer. Let’s break each one down in more detail.

Maple Institutional

To make things easier to understand, let’s use a simple analogy.

Maple is like Aave (PRO report here) but built specifically for institutions. It’s a money market built for institutions, connecting verified lenders with trusted borrowers.

Now, you might be wondering why institutions need something different. It’s for these reasons:

• Legal Protection: Big borrowers need formal agreements and legal backup. Maple offers this, while DeFi relies only on smart contracts only.

• Predictable Terms: DeFi loans often have floating rates and no set end date. Maple offers fixed rates and terms, giving borrowers more stability.

• KYC Rules: Many institutions can only deal with verified counterparties. Since DeFi doesn’t require KYC, it’s often off-limits to them.

And Maple has a lot more going on under the hood.

Every borrower on Maple Institutional goes through full KYC and a detailed credit check by Maple’s team to mitigate the risks of potential default. This process can include:

• Financial review: Looking at income history, balance sheet strength (especially liquid assets), and current debt levels.

• Qualitative checks: Interviews with the team, review of risk controls, use of funds, and overall strategy.

• Operational readiness: Proving they can handle margin calls, track collateral in real time, and work with custodians.

Plus all lenders on Maple have to go through KYC too, and they can pick lending pools based on their risk appetite. Each pool has its own rules on what assets can be used as collateral, so lenders can choose what they’re most comfortable with.

• Blue Chip Secured: Only lends against top assets like $BTC and $ETH, aiming for a 10–12% APY.

• High Yield Secured: Accepts a wider range of assets like $SOL and $XRP as collateral, with higher target returns of 15–20% APY.

As you can see below, these two pools (black and purple) are the most popular and make up 93% of all activity on Maple Institutional.

Altogether, these products hold a total of $570 million in TVL (total value locked). Just a year ago, TVL was only $90 million — so this jump to $570 million shows a clear rise in institutional interest. 

And it’s not going unnoticed. Big names like Aave and Ethena are now making moves to get a piece of that momentum too.

Now you might be wondering how Maple actually makes money from all this. It’s pretty straightforward as most lending/borrowing protocols use the same model.

Maple takes around 15-20% of the interest paid by borrowers as its revenue. We will get to the revenues later. 

Now let’s talk about their second product: