Pendle price

Big week for stablecoins: 1. Plasma instant reached its 1B deposit target 2. Stripe acquired Privy 3. Coinbase partnered with Shopify to enable USDC payments 4. Circle traded 300% higher than IPO price Makes sense to buy more aggressively $AAVE, $PENDLE and $SKY.

Spaghetti chart anchored to the dump shows $PENDLE is the strongest bounce. Surprisingly ETH DeFi is in there too but likely because it dumped harder so mean reversion in raw % to the upside is also bigger, and unsurprisingly, $HYPE

Words: @defi_gaz, Castle Labs Compiler: Alex Liu, Foresight News This cycle has been challenging for many. If there is one word to describe it, it is probably "extraction". Crypto-native funds are moving at an unprecedented rate that can make even the most seasoned gamblers feel dizzy. Protocols do everything they can to roll out incentives to try to bring limited liquidity into their products, even if those funds only stay for a few days before the next hot spot emerges. Meanwhile, Bitcoin's dominance has continued to climb since the November 2022 lows, largely thanks to seemingly never-ending institutional buying. Bitcoin market share, data: TradingView The implications are self-explanatory. There is no doubt that the crypto market is maturing. We're finally seeing the regulatory clarity needed to drive the next step in the industry, with many protocols shifting their target user base to different types of players. The giants are coming, and they are coming with deep pockets. We've seen the impact of these big institutions. The entire Real World Assets (RWA) space has grown steadily, with the current total value locked (TVL) climbing to around $12.6 billion. Many of the best in the space are developing products geared towards institutional capital participation, some of which are even built directly by the institutions themselves. Among emerging projects, Maple Finance stands out for its revenue and growth in assets under management (AUM). This rapid growth is clearly reflected in the price action of the SYRUP token and shows no signs of slowing down. What is Maple Finance? In a nutshell, Maple Finance aims to bring asset management on-chain by offering a suite of financial products tailored to institutions, with a particular focus on lending. The team was founded in 2019 and has a strong background in traditional finance. They are well versed in what it takes for large institutions to enter the crypto world at scale. Maple takes a minimalist approach to the types of collateral used on its platform, focusing solely on the top-tier blue-chip tokens and stablecoins – exactly the type of asset that large institutions are eager to get their hands on. The numbers speak for themselves. Source: Maple Finance Dune dashboard According to the latest data from the Maple Finance Dune dashboard, its total assets under management (AUM) is around $2.2 billion, an increase of more than $1 billion since the beginning of May. That's a staggering 5x increase from January 1, 2025. Active outstanding loans on the platform saw a similar increase, rising by about 30% in May. Maple's revenue performance was similarly strong, with its most recent monthly revenue breaking the $1 million mark, up 61.21% from April. Since March 2023, its average monthly revenue growth rate has remained at around 28%, with a clear trend. These revenues are primarily derived from interest shares charged to borrowers, as well as the proceeds generated from depositing collateral into DeFi protocols. Source: Maple Finance Dune dashboard Maple has 3 unique lending products that help it achieve such impressive results: High Yield: 9% Net Annualized Yield (APY) using BTC, ETH and a select set of top altcoins as collateral. Blue-chip lending: 6.9% net annualized yield, using only BTC and ETH as collateral. Bitcoin Yields: Allows large institutional Bitcoin holders to earn a net annualized yield of 4-6% on their BTC holdings. It is important to note that higher-yielding products require a higher overcollateralization ratio to compensate for the higher volatility of the underlying asset that they use as collateral. Take a deep dive into Maple Maple is quickly becoming the platform of choice for large institutional borrowers. Its rigorous borrower vetting process – ensuring they can meet their financial commitments – is key to differentiating it from other lending agreements. These licensed borrowers need to go through an in-depth underwriting process to assess the strength of their balance sheet and ensure they have the operational capacity to meet margin calls in a declining market. The underlying collateral is held in custody by an institutional-grade escrow solution, and Maple provides on-chain collateral verifiability, enabling lenders to view collateral details for each outstanding loan. With liquid blue-chip tokens as collateral and active, institutional-grade collateral management, Maple is able to consistently and securely deliver above-market yields. Thanks to the process of selecting the best borrowers and the highest quality collateral, as well as the focus on short-term loan terms, liquidation events are extremely rare in the Maple ecosystem. SYRUP tokens The SYRUP token is the native token of Maple. SYRUP is used for platform governance, incentivizes participation through staking, and enables holders to benefit from the growth of the Maple ecosystem. Currently, about 42.7% of the 1.07 billion SYRUP tokens in circulation have been staked on the platform. Stakers can earn rewards from Maple's token buyback (thanks to the protocol's revenue) and earn an APY of 2.7% with no lock-up period. The release of SYRUP is planned to be approximately 5% per annum and lasts for 3 years from inception. This means that all SYRUP tokens will be in full circulation by September 2026. syrupUSDC/USDT and Drips rewards Users who lend USDC or USDT to the Maple platform will receive the corresponding liquidity certificate (LP Token): syrupUSDC or syrupUSDT. Immediately after receiving syrupUSDT, it will start accumulating an APY of 6.6% and can be used on numerous DeFi platforms. The annualized yield of syrupUSDC is around 10.6%, which is better than protocols like AAVE, Ethena, and Compound. This, coupled with its extreme focus on security, makes Maple a top choice for users looking to maximize stablecoin returns. In addition to earning yield by depositing USDC or USDT and DeFi usage exceptions, lenders will also receive Drip rewards. These rewards can be converted into more staked SYRUP tokens at the end of each "season", allowing users to compound their SYRUP holdings over time. Drips themselves are compounded every 4 hours, boosting the total APY for SYRUP stakers. Collaboration & Integration Over the past few months, Maple has entered into a number of notable collaborations and plans to continue to expand its network in the crypto and traditional finance space. April 2025: Announced a major partnership with Spark, including an investment of 50 million USDC in syrupUSDC. March 2025: Bitwise joins and begins allocating funds to the Maple ecosystem, further cementing Maple's position as the ecosystem of choice for large institutional capital. Maple is pleased to announce its participation in the Convergence ecosystem. The initiative, led by Ethena and integrating protocols such as Pendle and Morpho, aims to accelerate on-chain adoption of institutional-grade real-world assets (RWAs). February 2025: The Core Foundation, in partnership with Maple, announced the launch of the lstBTC product, a liquid, interest-bearing Bitcoin token designed for institutions to earn yield from their BTC holdings. May 2025 (most recently): Maple closed its first bitcoin-backed financing from global investment bank Cantor. This opens up an initial funding channel worth $2 billion for institutional Bitcoin holders to leverage their BTC through the Maple ecosystem. In addition, the syrupUSDC integration with Pendle is ideal for users who want to boost their returns with syrupUSDC and earn up to 5x multiplier Drip rewards at the same time. Competitive landscape Maple Finance operates in a sector where its client base is primarily made up of large funds, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals. Because Maple underwrites its loans and requires all borrowers to complete a KYC (Know Your Customer) process to prove its creditworthiness, it occupies a unique niche between DeFi and centralized finance (CeFi). This solves two major problems that existed in the past DeFi and CeFi models: The risks involved in large institutional participants looking to deploy capital on-chain through a decentralized platform provider. The process of accessing credit through traditional financial methods or in the world of centralized financial providers is slow, costly, and restrictive. Maple aims to address both of these issues with a hybrid approach: combining the overcollateralization common in DeFi lending protocols, with the strict compliance, credit assessment, and borrower underwriting typical of the traditional financial world. Compared to other platforms in the space, we're starting to see Maple's underestimated potential. For example, Ondo Finance has about $1.3 billion in TVL, a market capitalization (MC) of $2.6 billion, and a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of about $8.36 billion. BlackRock's Buidl has about $2.9 billion in TVL and a market capitalization of $2.9 billion (considering the full dilution of the token). Maple, on the other hand, currently has a TVL of $2.2 billion and a market capitalization of only $567.8 million. Even when fully diluted is considered, it is valued at only about $631 million. On the basis of TVL vs. market capitalization, the potential upside of Maple relative to its competitors seems very clear. Obviously, this is a very basic way of valuing a protocol, and there are many factors to consider when assessing the future potential of a protocol; However, it quickly reveals the value disparities that currently exist in the institutional lending space. As the sector continues to grow in size, Maple's recent growth rate puts it in a position to outperform its competitors – provided it continues at its current pace and doesn't flatten out anytime soon. epilogue As a relatively new player in the decentralized institutional lending space, Maple is well-positioned to capture a significant market share in the coming months and years. Their goal is to achieve $4 billion in TVL by the end of the year, as follows: syrupUSDC/USDT: $1 billion Bitcoin yield product: $1.5 billion Other Maple Institutional Product Suite: $1.5 billion Time will tell if they can achieve these goals, but so far the situation has improved. As the crypto market as a whole matures, projects with solid fundamentals are more likely to gain market share as the type of investor shifts from retail to institutional. These institutional participants are likely to look for the types of metrics they are accustomed to focusing on in the traditional financial world. PE ratios, revenue generation capacity, and moats will be their primary focus when entering the space. Therefore, following in their footsteps, extending our investment horizon and looking for outperformance protocols that have real fundamentals (as opposed to the "hype fundamentals" that have been crucial in the past, pumpamentals) will likely pay off.