Crypto lender Maple Finance expands support to Solana

Crypto capital markets platform Maple Finance has expanded support to the Solana blockchain and has deployed a $45 million fund to spur ecosystem growth.

Maple provides undercollateralized loans for institutional borrowers on Ethereum (ETH) and now Solana (SOL) from several pool delegates. The project stated in an Apr. 25 blog post that it has already “originated over $1.2 billion in loans and currently count over $900 million in TVL to the platform.”

The ecosystem fund was launched in partnership with decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform X-Margin, with capital being provided by USD Coin (USDC) issuer Circle, digital asset manager CoinShares and several unnamed projects native to Solana.

— Maple | Solana & Ethereum (@maplefinance) April 25, 2022

Maple’s goal for its Solana arm (Maple Solana) is to “bring Maple’s on-chain capital-market infrastructure to scale the Solana ecosystem” and address financing needs on the network.

Maple is expecting the move to immediately drive strong activity on Solana, with the head of Maple Solana Quinn Barry outlining that:

“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.”

Providing a further update the following day, Barry also tweeted that Maple intends to launch a permissioned pool and to allow protocols, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and real-world entities to borrow funds by the end of 2022.

Maple Solana will also issue the SYRUP governance token in 2022, which will be analogous to Maple’s MPL governance token on Ethereum.

X-Margin serves as the first pool delegate on Maple Solana. The pool currently has $34 million in total cash, but there are no active loans and deposits are not yet generating interest. By the end of 2022, X-Margin expects the pool to control $300 million.

Institutions may find appeal in Maple’s platform because it conforms with required know-your-customer/anti-money laundering (KYC-AML) standards, like only a few DeFi lending protocols. 

Platforms such as Celsius (CEL) requires users to submit KYC information and has been a pool delegate on Maple’s Ethereum app since Feb. Lending protocol AAVE (AAVE) launched its permissioned Aave Arc pool in January which requires users to submit KYC information.

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