Maple Finance: A Leading Lending Protocol in the Bankless DeFi Innovation Index
The Bankless DeFi Innovation Index (GMI) is designed to capture the performance of the most significant tokens in the Decentralized Finance ecosystem.
January 27, 2022
Maple Finance: A Leading Lending Protocol in the Bankless DeFi Innovation Index
The Bankless DeFi Innovation Index (GMI) utilizes an indexing strategy to offer broad, diversified exposure in a single token. GMI allows users to de-risk their exposure to DeFi upstarts–which are often novel and risky, yet contain considerable upside.
GMI currently has a Market Capitalization of $2.4 million. From Jan. 10th, 2022 — Mar. 10th, 2022 you can stake GMI on the IndexCoop platform and earn INDEX. Currently returning 102.48% APR.
MPL is one of 12 tokens currently held in the GMI product. Here’s a basic overview of what you need to know about Maple Finance and the MPL token.
What is Maple Finance?
Maple Finance is an institutional capital marketplace powered by blockchain technology. Developed to solve the inefficiencies seen in traditional systems, Maple brings the corporate credit market 100% on-chain using smart contracts to remove time and cost frictions, and blockchains for immutability.
Maple Finance is infrastructure for experts to run on-chain lending businesses, and have three core customers Borrowers, Lenders and Pool Delegates. Maple offers Borrowers transparent, capital-efficient financing. For Lenders, Maple offers a sustainable and reliable yield source through lending to diversified pools of crypto’s premium institutions. Loans are managed and underwritten by sophisticated teams of credit analysts called Pool Delegates, who assess credit-worthiness and set loan terms with Borrowers.
Since launching on Ethereum mainnet in May 2021, Maple has achieved over $500M in TVL, across 4 lending pools and found product-market fit amongst crypto-native institutions needing access to capital to power their business operations.
The team is committed to growth in 2022 and plan to achieve $2BN TVL by the end of June and $5BN by the end of the year, through launching new lending pools and by launching on Solana in Q1 2022 to expand its total addressable market. Maple Finance will be the first protocol to take undercollateralized lending to Solana, and the first undercollateralized lending protocol to have a multi-chain presence.
What is MPL?
MPL is the Maple Finance ERC-20 native token. It serves three roles: governance, staking, and sharing in network fees accrued to the Maple Treasury. Following the launch of the protocol in May 2021, Maple distributed 5% of the total MPL token through a Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool and raised over $10M USDC as proceeds to fund the protocol while welcoming over 1000 new token holders to their community. MPL token holders can actively participate in governance and recently the community decided to use $1M USDC of fee revenue to buy-back Maple tokens.
The token can also be used to provide a reserve to cover defaults in Lending Pools, this insurance mechanism earns stakers a share of the interest paid by Borrowers.
There is good liquidity of the MPL token and it’s recently listed with CEX’s Coinbase, Huobi, and DEX’s UniSwap and Balancer.
Who created Maple?
Sid Powell is the CEO & Co-Founder of Maple Finance and with his Co-Founder Joe Flanagan founded Maple in 2018. Sid comes from a background in debt capital markets and institutional banking. During his career in traditional finance, he participated in $3BN+ of corporate bond issuance, established and ran a $200M+ bond funding program, and managed Treasury at a commercial lending FinTech company. Sid and Joe knew that Web3 tech could solve inefficiencies in traditional markets and developed Maple to bring debt-capital markets 100% on-chain using smart contracts to remove time and cost frictions, and blockchains for immutability.
Today the Maple team is 25+ strong, with staff from BlockFi, Kraken, Bank of America, Gemini and MakerDAO to name just a few blue-chip orgs. Team profiles are shared on their site and they’re always hiring. Maple recently acquired Avari, an undercollateralized lending protocol built on Solana and founded by Stanford engineers. Quinn Barry and Jeffrey Hu are deeply embedded in the Solana ecosystem and together with the Maple team will grow Maple in 2022 and into the future.
What makes Maple Finance stand out?
Maple Finance stands out because it facilitates undercollateralized loans to crypto-native institutions after rigorous due diligence. An index that tracks the performance of growing decentralized financial protocols wouldn’t be complete without Maple.
Undercollateralized lending in crypto is still comparatively small, representing less than 1% of the outstanding debt market. Maple Borrowers today are primarily crypto-native market-makers and DAOs, that might be very profitable but struggle to access capital from banks because the space still has a bit of a reputational risk. Undercollaralized lending is managed by Pool Delegates who are sophisticated underwriters often a fund manager or an asset manager, or a team with fixed income or banking experience.
Maple list impressive institutional investors and strategic partners such as Alameda Research, Framework, Polychain, Wintermute, Orthogonal Trading, Maven 11, BlockTower.
MPL Tokenomics
The circulating supply of MPL is currently 3,771,774, out of a maximum 10,000,000 supply with a market capitalization of $61 million USD. MPL token distribution structure looks like; 30% Liquidity Mining; 25% Seed and Advisor; 26% Seed; 5% Public Sale, 14% Treasury.
About Index Coop
Index Coop is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that powers structured decentralized finance (DeFi) products and strategy tokens using smart contracts on the blockchain. We offer a suite of sector structured products, leverage and inverse products, and yield-generating products. We aim to create products that are simple to use, accessible to everyone and secure. Our products are built on Set Protocol, a twice-audited, self-custodial DeFi tool that allows for the creation and management of Ethereum-based (or ERC-20) tokens. Among users, partner protocols, and our composable products, Index Coop maintains one of the largest partnership networks in the DeFi ecosystem.
How to buy Index Coop products with fiat currencies:
- First, you’ll need to create an Ethereum wallet like Argent, Metamask, Gemini, or Rainbow.
- Next, you’ll set up your new wallet and connect your bank account
- Once you’ve deposited fiat currency in your wallet you can exchange it for Index Coop products like the Bankless DeFi Innovation Index (GMI).
You can also earn or buy MPL tokens directly via your favorite decentralized exchange.
>>Click here to buy GMI Tokens
Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and is not legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. You should not take, or refrain from taking, any action based on any information contained herein, or any other information that we make available at any time, including blog posts, data, articles, links to third-party content, discord content, news feeds, tutorials, tweets, and videos. Before you make any financial, legal, technical, or other decisions, you should seek independent professional advice from a licensed and qualified individual in the area for which such advice would be appropriate. This information is not intended to be comprehensive or address all aspects of Index or its products. There is additional documentation on Index’s website about the functioning of Index Coop, and its ecosystem and community.
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