# Maple Finance: Institutional DeFi, Tokenomics, and Fintech Partnerships

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-07-21

## Transcript

The people who are building at the moment and who are kind of ignoring the negative sentiment and the dissatisfaction around prices are going to win when we have, you know, this resurgence and hit the kind of...
hit the tipping point on the S-curve where we go at financial.
The entire financial world is moving on-chain, but what does that mean?
What does it look like?
And how does on-chain finance and asset management work in actual practice?
What do these terms mean?
Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that some syrup goes on pancakes and some goes in your crypto wallet.
But if you get the two mixed up, you're going to have a sticky situation.
I'm your host, John Gillan.
Today is Tuesday, July 21st.
And today we are joined by Sid Powell.
founder and CEO of Maple Finance, founded in 2019 to bring institutional grade credit infrastructure on chain with over four and a half billion dollars in AUM.
Sid is helping to lead Maple and their Syrup token to new and impressive innovations in the world of on-chain asset management.
Sid is going to pour a lot of syrupy alpha on this conversation in this episode.
I'm really excited for this one.
So that sounds good to you.
Make sure you like and subscribe.
share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it today's episode is brought to you by securitize the regulated rails for tokenization and bit get stocks 2.0 with real liquidity real dividends and without further ado welcome back to the milk road show sid powell how are you hey john i'm going well glad to uh glad to be here again I'm glad to have you back.
I think there's a lot of things to talk about today, but I wanted to start the conversation with something I think you have a front row seat to, which is this gulf between institutional bull market and adoption of crypto and digital assets and retail sentiment and bear market prices being at all time low.
Can you talk about what that experience has been like from your perspective and what you're seeing happening there?
Yeah, sure.
It's an inverse to what we've seen in past markets where 2021, 2022, it felt like there was all-time high euphoria, but maybe not as much in the way of traction.
I think today, from my seat working in the institutional DeFi space, I think traction is actually fantastic.
You can see it in some of the partnerships that have come out, whether it's Robinhood released their EARN program.
which uses DeFi Rails on the back end, which we can talk about a little bit more soon.
You've seen JP Morgan is tokenizing.
Jamie Dimon was famously not the biggest fan of crypto, but here they are launching tokenized money market funds and settling things on chain.
And then, of course, stablecoin adoption is at an all-time high.
So I think about it in terms of this kind of paradigm of you had Carlota Perez had sort of famously talked about the cycle of technology revolutions where you have an initial hype cycle and maybe the valuation of startups and capital entering the space is quite high and exceeds adoption.
And then you have this kind of crash phase, which I think we would all acknowledge we had around the end of 2022 and into 2023.
And then you start to see the deployment phase.
We have real adoption.
bulge bracket banks launching tokenized products, the largest asset managers in the world talking about tokenization.
So it's Larry Fink at BlackRock, Apollo, and prices are lagging that level of adoption.
I would say that's where we are today.
So I think from my inside seat, I think traction is very good.
And I think prices on the retail side will eventually come to catch up.
with the level of adoption that we're seeing.
But there's a lot of other things taking people's attention.
You've had SpaceX IPO, you have Anthropic, OpenAI, both poised to IPO, and then you've had a lot of hype around semiconductors.
And I think that just, that distracts the average investor and has drawn a lot of attention away from the real fundamental progress being made in the crypto and blockchain side.
Hi everyone, this is John.
Listen, our Milkroad Pro analysts nailed this AI bull market.
They had dozens of calls pay off in a big way for our community.
If you want to see how our entire team of analysts are positioning for the crypto bull market that's going to come after this bear market finally ends, you can join us now at Milkroad Pro.
It's just a dollar.
Link is in the description.
You'll get access to all of our analysts' trades, their watch lists, and see how they're navigating this in their portfolios, and get access to ask us questions in Discord anytime, day or night.
It's just a dollar.
Link's in the description.
Milkroad Pro.
Join now.
I'll see you there.
Yeah.
So on these fundamentals in a market that everyone is calling a bear market, Maple's loans are at an all time high.
I checked today, it's 1.75 billion in loans.
Demand seems to be going up, not down.
And I want to know why you think this is happening in a bear market and why is so much capital coming to Maple as opposed to one of the many other places they can go for yield on chain?
What are your thoughts on this?
I think there's a few reasons.
So we, you know, as you mentioned, John, we are at, you know, close to an all-time high in terms of loans outstanding on maple we have around 4.6 billion AUM loans have been close to 2 billion outstanding and uh i would say a couple things drive it so one while the overall crypto sector is very cyclical you know it has ups and downs i think the yield sector is a little bit counter cyclical in that when bitcoin is not pushing all-time highs folks start to wonder how do i put my stable coins to work how do i get a yield on my on my uh on my stable coins where i don't have much risk of uh you know of downside movement in prices and so they rotate out of holding assets themselves and and they start to look for yield and that's where maple has really stood out you know over the first half of this year our yield products outperformed the peers in d5 about 110 basis points or 1.1 on average so you know if you look you're getting mid threes on t-bills you're getting around that maybe into like uh you know high threes on a lot of defy yield products and then maple has been offering you know high fours up to sort of around five percent so i think that was attracting a lot of people it's why we saw a strong deposit inflows this year and why you know why you've seen a lot of uh you know newer firms kind of partner with us and offer the uh you know offer our defy yield products to their customers so I think that's been a major driver.
We continue to see stablecoin adoption be very strong as well.
It's around 300 billion.
And for us, stablecoins are kind of like the oxygen.
We do all of our loans in stablecoins.
We raise our capital to lend out in stablecoins.
And so I think the resilience of stablecoin market cap relative to the price of Bitcoin starting the year at around 100K.
around 100k and being you know closer to the low 60s today uh you know has driven a lot of that traction that we see could you differentiate for me some of maple's positioning and products from other players in the market like an ave or a sky or a morpho just because i think it would benefit our audience to just understand a little bit of the niche that you guys sit in and and how you're differentiated from those other products yeah it's good to uh you know it's good to to compare our offering to theirs i think What I would say is while there are many other offerings in DeFi, there's actually only a few large ones that have a decent enough track record and where folks are kind of confident in one, them not getting hacked and suffering loss that way.
And also, you know, also to the kind of the durability and the stability of the yield.
You know, we're kind of gone from the days we're going to get one.
when you're going to go and farm a 20% APY food coin, now you're kind of looking for much more stability and, you know, an understanding of where the yield comes from.
So just to compare Maple, so our core business has been over collateralized lending with large cap crypto assets as the collateral.
So we do a lot of loans against Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, XRP.
In our case, we're pretty much exclusively lending to institutional borrowers.
So a prime broker, an asset manager, an exchange, a large family office.
These guys are borrowing anywhere from 10 million up to 500 million loan sizes.
So it's not retail lending.
And they'll usually post collateral to a qualified custodian.
So they don't want to stick their collateral.
in a smart contract where it's exposed to a hack or an oracle risk or a price manipulation of some kind.
So that's been our core differentiator and kind of where we sit in or how we've carved out a niche for ourselves.
One, it means that we can charge a little bit more.
It means that we are a little bit less exposed to smart contract risk than some of our peers.
And so that niche and having legal agreements kind of backing the loans.
That's been the niche that we've carved out and it's why we're able to charge a little bit more for our loans and therefore why our yield is higher.
And that means that we're able to partner with DeFi protocols like Aave and like Morpho where we can have our Syrup USD so that the DeFi LP tokens of our products supported as collateral.
And then it's also why we can serve as a backing asset for other uh what i would say are maybe more stable coin or yield products like sky or athena that are out there so that you know these players work with us and include maple assets as a form of backing uh that helps them generate yields so they can pay yield to their customers and and support the asset balance of their own stable coin so we try and kind of navigate this uh or try this path of being a little bit neutral and kind of working with everyone in the defy space so i think that framing is helpful but i think it kind of poses a natural question of do you see all of these different players as either partners or as competitors or some of both?
And like, you know, here at Milk Road, we've been very focused on the Sky ecosystem and what they're building there.
So maybe take them as just like one example.
Are they a peer, a competitor, a partner?
How do you think about those relationships?
I think each of them is a little bit of both.
I think you'd have to be naive to kind of look at all of these players and say they are only...
partners and there's no competitive angle.
But I think you're also losing the forest for the trees when you say there are only competitors and there's not a way for us to work together.
I think the savvy operator and the team that's thinking for the long term tries to kind of work, tries to find ways to partner with people who would otherwise be competitors.
So if we look at Sky, for example, they've allocated to us.
So in that sense, there's a partnership.
And so we've worked with each of their stars.
So they have Spark, they have OBEX, they have Grove.
We have great relationships with each of these teams.
Those teams can both allocate to Maple and then they can also go out and do their own lending.
So in that sense, there is a somewhat competitive angle, but you can see that we're actually at the same time working with them as partners.
Where we naturally fit in and kind of work symbiotically with the Sky.
uh ecosystem is that maple syrup usd assets the syrup usdc syrup usdt can serve as uh one of the backing assets and yield sources for uh usds and susds when when they pay out a yield that will come from a mix of real world assets crypto lending institutional lending and we slot into one of those buckets so we are in fact you know, one of the allocations that helps generate the yield that supports that ecosystem and helps it grow.
So, you know, that's just one example.
But you can see there's always both a competitive angle and a complementary partnership angle.
And naturally, we always try and steer towards the partnership angle.
I interviewed Joe Shalom, who's the CEO of Sharplink, one of the largest digital asset treasury companies for Ethereum, and he used this concept of coopetition.
Yeah, I think it's good.
Yeah.
yeah and i think that kind of gets to what you're saying there too so it sounds familiar and i appreciate that perspective i want to talk about another partnership that uh maple has has had here uh robin hood chain launched on july 1st maple launched a product called syrup usdg to help power the robin hood earn product and i wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about this partnership this product and and what's your what you're excited about here yes i mean uh obviously we we were very excited to be part of uh of the robin hood chain launch and and Robinhood Earn product.
I mean, Robinhood is obviously a behemoth within the fintech space.
They have over 350 billion of assets.
They have over 30 million customer accounts.
So we think there's going to be a phenomenal success.
Maple is one of the DeFi partners who are working behind the scenes to make the Earn product work.
So when a Robinhood customer logs onto the app, they see Robinhood Earn.
they have the option to to earn a yield and that yield comes from a composite of sources so it's using a morpher vault and then the morpher vault can allocate to certain assets or accept certain assets as collateral to lend against so you have uh you know other d5 blue chips like athena in there uh grove or steakhouse are one of the curators so it's very much a uh you know a team effort to kind of bring this together but we launched syrup usdg which is one of the assets uh eligible for that vault and so you know, we are one of the sources of yield that ultimately goes to the Robinhood earned customers.
So I think for us, the really exciting aspects are obviously one, you know, distribution, having a great partnership, but we think this is a really exciting way to get new money and users into the DeFi ecosystem.
Because if you'd look, I'd say it's been relatively flat the last couple of years.
and we're looking now for where is the marginal user for DeFi?
Is it somebody who actively has to manage their wallets and connect to the protocols?
Or, and this is where I think the puck is going, is it a seamless user experience where to a certain extent you don't know, it's not telegraphed that it's DeFi on the back end, but you get this seamless experience where you're earning yield, your dollars.
are portable and the yield starts coming through instantly in the same way that we're used to seeing where it comes through block by block on chain.
So I think we are going to over time close the gap between DeFi and fintechs and what I would call Web2 Finance.
And I think this is a really exciting partnership that illustrates that.
And for us, we got to launch Syrup USDG.
So our third stablecoin.
yield product and you know we think the usdg consortium is uh is great and uh you know ultimately we are kind of stable agnostic to which particular stablecoin we use we we actually just want to see all stable coins uh grow in adoption and usage Your co-founder at Maple, Joe Flanagan, said that he believes the most critical thing for Maple to push for right now is the growth of on-chain capital markets.
And I'm curious what that looks like for you all, because I think looking at this Robinhood partnership as an example, you could say that it's launching new products, like the Syrup USDG is a new product, right?
But you could also say it's expanding access to what you're already doing, and sometimes maybe it's both.
What's your focus on that in terms of growing the on-chain capital markets?
Is it trying to expand access?
Is it trying to launch new partnerships?
What does that look like for you?
What's the focus for you?
I think it's both.
It's kind of a trite answer to say, you pick A or B, well, I choose both.
But let me explain that a little bit.
So Joe and I both come from capital markets backgrounds.
And so over time, our thesis has been that more and more capital markets activity will happen on chain.
What does it actually mean?
It means you're going to see loans and settlements and financial transactions increasingly take place in stablecoins.
You're going to see the assets that are being transacted increasingly tokenized and you're going to see more, I think, more direct distribution to customers.
So in this case, that is the Robinhood customer directly going into yield products that connect to DeFi.
The other thing I should say is that you're going to see more of a longer tail of assets come on chain.
I think that is part of the whole cost reduction we're talking about here.
So with that thesis in mind, we've tried to focus on what moves the puck forward for us and ultimately kind of what are the mega trends we can attach to that will benefit Maple and our mission of funding innovative companies on chain.
So I think...
Broadly, stablecoin adoption helps.
So having a new product, Syrup USDG, denominated in stablecoins, we're doing loans in USDG is helpful.
And having a portal for regular fintech consumers who previously didn't know they were using stablecoins to now seamlessly access stablecoins.
You know, they think they can log in.
see a button that says fund my account and earn yield and all of the mechanics and kind of operational friction of having to swap from fiat into a stable coin or select your stable coin and approve transactions is actually abstracted on the back end.
I think that's ultimately what people have been citing as one of the major blockers and impediments to adoption of DeFi and crypto.
And, you know, and in this case, we're seeing it removed.
Yeah, and I think that the success that Robinhood has had with Robinhood Chain and they're famous for their UX experience, I think this is going to be something we're going to see a lot of other players following their lead, modeling this, and maybe some more things coming out in this space.
Do you think that this DeFi mullet, this vaults model, is something we're going to see copied across incumbents and newcomers?
And what do you think that looks like as we start to see more and more people start to offer versions of this in the marketplace?
Yeah, I do.
I think, look, I think vaults have found product market fit.
You know, we at Maple actually pioneered a form of vaults back in 2021.
So when we first launched, we had the concept of the lending pools.
Each lending pool would have its own.
We called it a pool delegate who was managing it.
But essentially, that was kind of the same role as what you see commonly referred to as a curator today.
So had the had the naming wrong, but the kind of the concept stuck.
And so it's taken a while to achieve broad adoption, I would say.
But one, I think the reason it's found fit today is one, it's very scalable.
And two, it obviously presents a great opportunity for traditional asset managers to come in and run their own vaults.
So you've seen Bitwise, Galaxy, Wintermute, these are all names who previously were not doing vault curation, who had other business lines who have now come in and said, you know, we're going to offer vaults, we want to curate them.
And so I think...
I think more traditional asset managers, whether it's private credit players or traditional banks or other asset managers are going to look at this and decide to come in and do their own vaults.
So I think you'll expect to see more of it.
What I'm looking forward to is I think the next step is seeing transactions actually originated on chain.
So that equity investment that a private equity fund does, if you have a private equity vault curator, I look forward to seeing them settle.
the actual equity investment or do the takeover or do the M&A activity in stablecoins directly from the vault.
That's what Maple does today.
So we do institutional lending where we curate our own vaults and then we settle the loans with institutions directly from our vault in stablecoins.
So we're already doing that in the private credit sense.
I think we're a little bit ahead of the rest of the ecosystem in that respect.
But I think looking forward five years from now, you'll see private equity vault managers.
You'll see uh you know uh macro pod shops running their own vaults and settling their transactions directly from the vaults and also you got to understand as well it gives you much more flexibility as to what you invest in because you can settle any of these assets in a tokenized form uh and uh and uh you know fund the investments directly in stable coins so it's very different to the kind of the the architecture and the plumbing that needs to work in tradfire to make that happen Real-world assets like funds, treasuries, and private credit are still running on rails built decades ago.
Gated, paperwork-heavy, slow to settle.
Everyone's talking about tokenizing them, but far fewer can actually do it, and do it without cutting regulatory corners.
Securitize can.
It's the SEC-regulated infrastructure bringing real-world assets on-chain.
Nine years in, native tokenization, not wrapped, backed by BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and Cathie Woods Ark Invest, and chosen by the New York Stock Exchange, VanEck, BNY, and Apollo to do it at scale.
It's the regulated bridge between traditional finance and crypto.
Tokenize the world at milkroad.com forward slash securitize.
Everyone's tokenizing stocks these days, but almost nobody's doing it right.
Thin liquidity, prices that drift from the real thing, dividends that just vanish.
BitGet Stocks 2.0 is different.
real NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange depth through licensed brokers.
Prices mapped one-to-one, dividends paid to your account in real time.
Plus you get the lowest fees in the market at just 0.04%.
And you can trade them like any other crypto as margin in earn in grid trading.
Tokenized stocks finally done right.
Head to milkrow.com slash bitget to get started.
You guys have always been a little bit ahead of the ecosystem, Sid.
That's why it's so much fun to watch what Maple's been building.
I want to pivot a little bit and talk about the Syrup token because every, well, not every, but most things in the digital asset space have their own digital asset, but they all manage them and treat them a little bit differently.
I think Maple has been very innovative about Syrup and that token.
I wonder if you could just walk us through a little bit about how protocol revenue from Maple's activities flows to Syrup today because I know there's been some recent changes.
into those, but just talk us through the token syrup, how it fits into the Maples business and how that business drives revenue and value to the token.
Yeah, I'll try and simplify it so that I don't bore everyone with kind of legal jargon.
There's a lot of details in this.
Good luck.
So the first thing to note is we don't have an equity structure.
So we never raised equity.
or raised venture capital into an equity entity and then issued the token out of that entity or gave that entity a bunch of tokens.
So we're different from most other protocols and crypto teams out there, I would say.
But the benefit that gives us is there's no conflict.
So you don't have equity holders on an equity cap table saying we have first dibs on the revenue, as you kind of saw recently with, you know, with Venice.
And so with that conflict not there, we just have the token at the center of the ecosystem.
So we have a Cayman Foundation, which owns subsidiaries that do institutional lending.
So those subsidiaries lend out stable coins from the vaults, and then they receive interest back.
They pass most of the interest onto the LPs who are in Syrup USCC and Syrup USCT and Syrup USDG.
But they keep a small portion of the interest as revenue.
And that means that it's then wholly owned or that subsidiary is wholly owned by the Cayman Foundation.
And then the Cayman Foundation also has the subsidiary that issues the token.
So it's actually all housed then within the one corporate structure.
And just to address the only other missing piece, the IP is then housed in a Guernsey Trust.
and is the sole beneficiary and the Cayman Foundation is the sole beneficiary of that.
So we now have the IP, the revenues and the token issuance is all housed within the singular corporate structure of which there is no equity cap tape.
So all we have then is syrup.
So when a lot of people say, well, like what's the utility of the syrup token?
I would say, well, having separate utilities kind of more necessary.
We have an equity structure over here and you're trying to justify the existence of the token.
Here, we don't have an equity structure, so the token is the only way you can participate in the ecosystem.
Therefore, de facto, the revenue is tied up in the same ecosystem as which the token is.
Very helpful explanation.
That was very thorough.
You did a great job.
On July 13th, there was a governance proposal passed and it introduced revenue-linked token buybacks.
I would really love to hear you try to explain for our audience how this rules-based buyback program works for the Syrup token and what this governance proposal change does for the tokenomics here.
Yeah.
So it's worth taking a step back and kind of looking back a few months ago.
A few months ago, we had a proposal that passed, which was we're going to take 25% of revenues and allocate it to the Syrup Strategic Fund, or SSF.
And there it could either be used for buybacks or it could be held as stable coins or as Bitcoin or other liquid assets.
But it was going to then benefit the growth of the protocol, help provide liquidity and be this kind of strategic reserve.
The feedback we got was that Token holders wanted to see more allocated towards buybacks as opposed to reinvesting in the growth of the protocol.
You always have a tension as a startup in that you're growing and theoretically in almost all instances, the actual best use of capital is to reinvest in the growth of your business.
I subscribe to that.
I think we've actually done a really good job of growing the business by just reinvesting capital in it.
However, there's a tension where we also want to listen to the community and we want to show that we take their feedback on board and we take it seriously.
Where we've got to was with MIP or Maple Improvement Proposal 21, we've tied revenues to token buybacks.
Where monthly revenue is below 1.5 million dollars we would do 10 goes towards buying back the token on a monthly basis where the monthly revenue is between one and a half and two million we would do 20 and then where uh monthly revenue is above uh two two million uh we would do 30 and so uh what it gives us is some flexibility we're not allocated to a fixed budget buying back the token which you don't want to do if revenue is low Because you don't want to, I mean, think of that as a company that is kind of paying out more dividends when it's in a business slot.
It just doesn't make sense.
The only way all startups go out of business at the end of the day is by running out of money.
So I think you want to be thoughtful about balance sheet and treasury management.
And so that's why we've done that.
But it now gives people a predictable way to say, okay, well, when business is going good, token buybacks will be up.
The team has listened and they can kind of plot.
Well, if we think.
revenues are going to 50 mil annualized this year and then further growing in years two three and four uh here we have a rough idea of what will happen with uh with buyback so it gives people predictability certainty it takes our discretion out of it so we think we think this is a nice uh we think there's a nice middle ground that keeps the token holder allows the token holders to see the clearer participation between uh maple's revenue the growth of our business and uh and value accrual um through buybacks uh whilst at the same time giving us flexibility and balance sheet management so that we can survive uh downturns and so that we can still build up a reserve and invest in the growth of the business i know that was really long-winded but hopefully it covers everything no that's very helpful yeah and i think it's it's a crazy ambition to not to want to not run out of money uh but i'm glad that's a priority too yeah right it's a revolutionary concept in digital assets what do you do with the syrup tokens that you buy back They go into the SSF, so the Syrup Strategic Fund Reserve, and you have a couple of options.
So you can either buy them back and burn them.
This is what a lot of people would want.
However, you can also buy them back and keep them for either a rainy day or for partnerships or for other growth uses or for capital raising in future.
I understand that buying them back and burning them is maybe a pure form of buyback mechanism because you just buy back the tokens, retire them from circulation.
However, I think taking these tokens out of active circulation and if the one kind of encourages you to buy them back at a low and helps the protocol treasury benefit from buying back tokens when revenue is good and valuations are low.
So if the treasury buys back tokens at you know 12 cents and then six months later they're at 20 cents while the protocol treasury has captured that it's not being captured by any individuals um so ultimately in my view if you know it does benefit the uh the token holder community and the other thing you can always do is you can always then hold the governance vote to burn a portion of those tokens if you want some or all of them but yeah i don't think you need to uh I don't think you need to limit your optionality by just burning them as soon as they're repurchased.
I think that the name of strategic fund is appropriate for this reason, right?
Like you guys are trying to be thoughtful about all the different aspects of this process.
And I think that's it stands out and it's appreciated.
You spoke about this a little bit already, but I want to kind of have you unpack this for us.
Maple has been deliberately built with everything around the single token of syrup.
There's no equity stack, like you said.
But how does this shape the behavior, the decision-making of Maple?
And just talk to me about how you think about Maple and its relationship to syrup and how that drives a lot of the business practices at Maple Finance.
I think it forces more discipline in how you think about using the token because you're not...
When you have...
equity, like an equity cap table that is legally superior to the token portion of your capital structure.
One, it forces you to prioritize the interests of equity holders.
So you saw that in, for example, the Axelar acquisition last year, right?
The equity, the Labs entity got purchased, the token holders got nothing.
And you can't, if you have, if you collapse this and just have the token holder structure, you...
You can't have that.
You're not going to, you don't have a fiduciary obligation to put a separate class of people first.
So I think it encourages more long-term thinking.
One, it also just aligns our interests.
So I hold the token, team holds the token, any VC who has wanted to participate holds the token, retail token, there's retail token holders out there, but effectively our interests are aligned because we're all in the singular of the capital structure, which is the token.
Thirdly, I would say the way I think about tokens is maybe a little bit more akin to, you know, back when I was investing in stocks and when I was in debt capital markets.
But I, you know, I'm personally more focused on what I would call earnings per token or ultimately the cash flows that are attributable to any individual token.
So if you issue You know, if you grow revenues by 100%, but you also increase the token count 100%, then cash flow per token is kind of the same.
Ultimately, what you want to do is you want to grow the cash flows of the business and the protocol while keeping the token count.
either the same or ideally reduced.
And I think that's where buybacks become great over time.
And Charlie Munger talks about this.
If you have a business that durably produces cash flows and you can retire the shares or in this case, tokens, then you'll increase the cash flow, the free cash flow per token over time.
And I think that's kind of the ultimate goal.
And I think that's ultimately what all tokens should be valued on is some kind of discounted future cash flow analysis.
So the way I look at it is If in future we could issue tokens in such a way that produced a more than commensurate growth in revenues or free cash flow, that would be worthwhile doing.
However, if we can, ultimately the North Star has to be how much can we grow cash flows, you know, kind of per token.
And I think, you know, I think most crypto founders should kind of look at things that way.
I see a number of them treating tokens like funny money.
and just spending them profligately.
And I don't think that's the right thing to do by token holders.
I really appreciate you unpacking this because I think that there is a lot of conversation around this right now.
And so I'm glad to have your perspective on this.
I do want to just unpack a little bit more about the long term value here and beyond the buyback program.
How does things like growing Maple's AUM, increasing the revenue, or even these new partnerships and new products like Syrup USDG and the Robinhood Chain Partnership, how does that drive that long-term value to Syrup?
And how do you see that progressing as Maple continues to grow?
I'm unfortunately unable to talk about the future evaluation of Syrup.
But what I can tell you about is...
The growth of the overall business and kind of how that drives bottom line for the overall protocol.
Sure, let's do that instead.
So let's do that.
At its heart, Maple does lending.
So more AUM means more capital to lend out.
When our loans outstanding grows, we're able to charge more interest.
And the interest that flows through, as I said before, we pay a lot of the interest back to LPs and participants.
in Syrup USDC, Syrup USDT, and Syrup USDG and the permission pool.
That helps grow our AUM, but we keep a portion of that as revenue.
Overall, as AUM grows and loans outstanding grow, the revenue to the protocol grows and that means we can do more, spend more on buybacks of the token.
Ultimately, there's no other equity with a claim on those revenues.
you know, that means that the overall Maple ecosystem is more profitable.
We can spend more on buybacks.
And I would say, you know, there's more revenues and economics than flowing to token holders.
New products, you know, we just launched Syrup USDG.
We think this is going to be huge.
We, you know, we're very excited about the Robinhood partnership.
But as we launch more products, it allows us to attract more AUM and get more more net interest margin revenue.
And so that's also accretive to the underlying economics within Maple.
And some of the products we're excited about launching are, you know, the participation of the partnership with Robinhood Chain and Robinhood Earn is this example of kind of what we call Maple and Bet.
But effectively, it's like, how do we distribute the yield products, the DeFi mullet to fintechs and neobanks, which we think over time, will want to offer more stablecoin products to their users.
They've all over the last 12 months started offering crypto trading.
The next thing after you have crypto trading is, well, I've got to give my users and my customers a reason to keep stablecoin balances on my platform.
And so I need to offer them a yield so they have something to do when they're not trading.
And so we think that's going to be tremendously accretive to our AUM, our revenues, and ultimately benefit the token holders and syrup holders at the end of the day.
I really appreciate those thoughts, Sid, and thank you for tiptoeing around my dangerous question there.
I want to end with sort of your broader thoughts on the digital asset space.
It looks like the Clarity Act might finally pass here.
We'll see if it does or not, but it's something that seems to be a bit of surprise.
It looks like the clouds are parting there and it might happen.
The Bitcoin bear market seems to be near a bottom here.
We're looking at the second half of 2026, and you've talked a bit about this demand for lending on Maple has never been strong.
The institutional bull run has never been stronger.
What are you hoping to see in terms of the second half of 2026 from the digital asset class and the industry overall?
Less capitulation.
No, that's maybe too simplistic an answer.
But I think it's kind of funny and highlights the volatility we have within the space.
Yesterday, the odds of clarity passing were down below 30%.
Now we're up closer to 50% as of the last hour.
I think where we are at the moment as a sector, as we discussed at the start, John, I think traction is actually really good at the moment and you're seeing a lot of momentum behind crypto.
But the level of capitulation I see on my timeline among people I've known in the sector for years is higher than it's ever been.
And I think...
If you look at the people who are now doing extremely well within AI, it's the people who started building in 2017 and built through 2019, 2020.
And AI only had its PMF moment with ChatGPT in 2022, and now they're doing fantastically well.
But I would say the people who are building at the moment and who are kind of ignoring the negative sentiment and the dissatisfaction around prices are going to win when we have this resurgence.
and hit the tipping point on the S-curve where we go at Spanancial.
And so what am I looking for for the rest of the year?
I would love to see clarity come through.
I think my hot take is we're going to see many more fintechs and neobanks connect crypto and offer yield products to their customers.
And you're going to see continued...
participation via tokenization from traditional asset managers and bulge bracket banks.
And that's ultimately going to bring more users in.
So more stable coins, more tokenized assets means more revenue to DeFi protocols and teams.
Sid Powell, Maple Finance.
Thank you so much for coming on the Milk Road Show and sharing all these insights with us.
I think there's a lot of great alpha in this.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
As we've got on the handle there.
So I am at Syrup Sid on Twitter.
We are at Maple Finance, one word on X, I should say.
And if you want to go to our website, it's maple.finance.
And we have a contact us page there.
And that's where we post updates.
But we're very active on X.
So hit the follow button.
Well, I'm going to be paying attention.
I'm really excited about what you guys are building.
And I appreciate you coming on the Milk Road Show to share all these updates with us.
Thanks for being here, Sid.
Thanks for having me, John.
My pleasure.
And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
And we will see you all on the next episode of the Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event?
Subscribe to our channel.
Join the Milk Road daily and pro newsletters and start investing like the top 1%.
This show is for educational purposes only.
Nothing we say is financial advice.
Investing is risky.
Never invest more than you can afford to lose.