Retail sells, institutions buy: Maple Finance CEO Sid Powell

Transcript

Bitcoin is bouncing back and forth between 80 and 90K like your dad going back to the fridge over and over for more leftovers. But are we about to drop into another year-long crypto winter? Or are things about to get brighter for 2026? Hello and welcome to the Milkro Show. The crypto show that is here to remind you that whatever you think Bitcoin is going to do next, you're wrong. I'm your host, John Gillan. Today we are joined by Sid Pal. Sid is the CEO and co-founder of Maple Finance, a blockchainbased platform specializing in institutional lending and private credit strategies, which launched in 2019. They are now managing in excess of $4 billion in USD with a background in debt capital markets and institutional banking.

Powell has driven Maple's evolution into a key player in DeFi, including innovations like using Bitcoin for onchain loans. Sid is going to give us an inside scoop on Bitcoin, Bitcoin businesses, as well as the major trends he's watching out for in 2026. So, if all that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe. Share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. And as a reminder, we have decided to keep our Black Friday sale going a little bit longer to keep the good vibes going. Uh 40% off all access is still on up until midnight tonight. This is your last chance for real this time to upgrade and lock in Crypto Pro, Macro Pro, AI Pro, plus our all access portfolio, tons of other exclusive all access content at a 40% discount. Uh we are wrapping this up for real at

midnight tonight though. So if you're interested in getting on the alpha there, joining our community, make sure you check out the link in the show notes. Today's episode is brought to you by Block Trust IRA. Let AI outsmart the market and grow your crypto while you sleep. Reserved ETFs. Get exposure to the entire crypto market in a single token and chain link. Break the interoperability barrier and power the future of tokenized finance. And without further ado, welcome to the Milkro Show. Sid pal. How are you, sir? >> I'm good, John. Very glad to be here. Thanks for having me. >> I'm really excited for this conversation. I'm so glad you're here today. Uh I wanted to just start with what's on everybody's mind. Is Bitcoin in a bare market?

>> Start start with the easy questions. uh you know like at the start of the year I had a lot of predictions for BTC being north of 150. I I was pegging it as kind of somewhere between 150 and 180 this cycle. Uh I think endofear prediction would be it probably won't get there to uh to to 150 to 180. But I do think that we have not I don't think we're at the end of this cycle. And so I think Bitcoin can still get there in 2026. Uh, I look at, you know, I think recently it's been troubled by some of the near-term stuff. Uh, whether it's a hawkish Bank of Japan kind of signaling the end of the yen carry, uh, or whether it's just liquidity and and

and a bit of poor public perception around things like DATs. Uh, however, I do think, you know, you're you're still looking at upcoming rate cuts. We could see liquidity kind of reenter the market. I think institutional adoption of Bitcoin is still very strong. And so I think we can still get to to 150 uh in 2026. So for me, it's not the end of the bare, it's not the end of the bull market, sorry. It's just in a bit of a it's in a bit of a sideways trend at the moment. >> Yeah. I think a lot of us are trying to psych ourselves up for 2026. And the the history on this is that we we might have a long uh bare market here, but I'm with you on this, right? Like my my target was 140K. Um and I'm I am seeing a lot

of bullish things forming for 2026. So I I'm really hoping you're right on that. Um you have been also calling for or noting rather that even though the market in Bitcoin is is chopping in price action um the demand for crypto lending is is still been strong and I'm curious about how you've seen that in how you've seen that developing in this downturn. Are you still seeing institutional adoption and demand for onchain lending or do you think things have waned recently? What's your experience your perspective been like on that? there's a certain irreducible amount of demand for uh cryptobacked lending that we see in the market. So there's always going to be some activity from the prime brokers. I think during you know during slow periods demand from miners will pick up to borrow because they're not

going to be selling down their reserves. Um it's just the part of the market that slows down a little bit will be the hedge funds and the yield funds. So activity from them slows a little bit but I think from the rest of our clientele including prime brokers, exchanges, miners, we're still seeing relatively good demand. And uh the other thing is that you have two sides of the market. So you have the people who want to give you dollars to earn a yield and that's the for us that's the supply side of the market and then you have the folks who want to borrow and use that capital. And what we're seeing is that in a in a sideways market like this, there's very strong demand from the supply side because folks are no longer they no longer feel like they're missing

out on uh market beta or the uh the gains from from you know, Bitcoin appreciating. So they they start to become very focused on how do they get a yield? How do they make their dollars work for them? And so we're actually seeing pretty good inflows of late. And uh and I expect that trend to kind of continue heading into the end of the year. >> Gotcha. Yeah. It's nice to have a business where you have some all-w weather demand. Um especially in crypto. Um I think >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Well, let's Well, we're going to have some cyclicals here. Um I I I think you know, just for our audience to to kind of level set before we get deeper into Maple and and your business, um you've described yourselves as an onchain asset management firm. What is onchain asset management? just level set

for us on what this is. >> Yeah, I think uh you know this year we we've been calling ourselves an onchain asset manager and I think the real key word there is is onchain. So what does it mean? We all know what asset management is, but what does it mean to do it onchain? So when we when we think of onchain asset management, we think of transparency. So all of all of Maple's loans are in tokenized form. You can see them on the blockchain. Uh we think of liquidity. So, one of our fastest growing products this year has been syrup USDC, which is effectively represents the basket of loans. It's been one of the fastest growing liquid yield liquid dollar yield assets. And it's composable through DeFi. So, you can use it to borrow on Ave, you can

port it to Salana, you can fix the interest rate using Pendle or you can enter and exit instantly on secondary markets like unis swap. So the fact the composability through DeFi is a key aspect of doing this on chain and the other elements are we're very focused on cryptonative capital markets. So you'll see a lot of folks looking at taking a fund that exists offchain and then they just copy and paste it on chain. We're very much focused on doing the opposite which is we want to take cryptonative asset class uh like bitcoin backed lending and then we want to instead bridge that to trad and start to introduce traditional finance audiences to this and then the other element is that we always try and have utility

associated with with yield. So if I could encompass Maple in kind of uh a traditional finance analogy I would say we're very similar to Apollo. Apollo is an asset manager who is ultimately focused on lending and fixed income products. They just happen to do that with the old rails. They use fiat bank accounts. They use hard assets. Maple is very much focused on doing this with stable coins, cryptonative assets, and we distribute our asset management products through DeFi. >> Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, I think that's helpful to to just kind of explain this to people who maybe aren't super familiar with Maple uh and what you're doing. So, that that's really helpful there. Um, I wanted to kind of get a framing and sense of like who your clients are and who you're targeting for

growth as as far as your marginal next user. Uh, your minimum loan size is 10 million. Um, and that kind of like precludes a lot of retail investors. So, I'm I'm curious your thoughts on that. Like who are primarily your your clients? Who are your next uh clients that you're trying to bring in as far as like new user growth? Um, and do you think that that number of 10 million might go down or go higher? And like why is it set there right now? >> It's a good it's a good question. So the 10 million really puts us in the kind of the institutional lending market. So we wouldn't lend to say a mom and pop retail shop uh or you know or individual consumers. Different different kind of regulation, different sort of customer service and different you know wholly different operations required. So our

typical borrow would be you know it's prime brokers, it's some of the exchanges borrow from us. uh some large trading firms. I think some of the the Chicago market makers uh who do a lot of you know high frequency trading uh right on to uh Bitcoin mining companies who might use a loan from us for operational expenses so they don't have to sell Bitcoin uh and even you know even including family offices and high net worths who might want to take out a loan against crypto holdings so they can purchase real estate. Uh so it's uh the smallest loan would be 10 million. The largest ones we do would be 100 to 200 million uh at a clip. Uh so we now have

that kind of scale given that we have you know four to five billion in aum. But then on the other side we have the people who give us money and there are some retail users in there because we have the permissionless syrup syrup USDC and syrup USDT products. Those are available to retail outside of the US. uh but we also do have a lot of institutions who use those. So whether it's a stable coin issuer might use it for some of their treasury. We have uh hedge funds who use it uh high net worths, family offices, corporate treasuries. So it is a real mix on that side. But I think one of the things that uh facilitated growth there was the DeFi integrations. So it's you know it's

plugged into a morpho salana uh pendle. >> Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. See, this is I think very helpful because just because your primary clients for for your lending product are uh ma major institutions, it doesn't mean that there's not still a way for for retail investors to get involved in this business. I think that's very helpful >> and it's a very important element that this type of product so yield from curated loans to institutions which are all over collateralized is not a product you can actually buy anywhere. You can't go down to Morgan Stanley or any of the wealth managers and buy that product. So it's a very unique offering and that's one of the you know we'll talk later about niches and moes but I think that is one of the important things that

we've tried to do to differentiate ourselves is we are the only ones out there offering curated institutional yield that all comes from from over collateralized loans and uh that's that's one of the reasons that we have the 10 million minimum so that we can give you a product that you can't get elsewhere. >> Gotcha. you have been uh focused on stable coin adoption as a crucial piece of what's helping uh Maple grow and and grow your business. Um can you tell us about this? There's been a huge growth we've seen for Syrup USDC. Um and and just tell us a little bit about these stable coin products because there's going to be a lot more of these coming to the market. How is Maple going to be working with those to continue to expand this business that you're building here?

>> It's a good question. I think stable coins, the way I would class stable coins or describe them in relation to our business is it's a little bit like oxygen or it's uh you know it's the water that we swim in. So the one way to think of cryptobacked lending is as a percentage of stable coin supply. The other way that I think about it is as a percentage of Bitcoin market cap. So, you know, Bitcoin recently was around 2 billion or sorry, 2 trillion market cap and outstanding loans against Bitcoin were around 25 billion. So, it's a bit over 1% like 1.25%.

And then the other way to look at it is uh since Maple is lending really only stable coins, one function of how business how big our business can get is as a percentage of stable coin supply. So stable coins at around 260 to 270 billion at 25 billion outstanding loans it's a bit under 10%. So if we want to you know if we want to 10x our business then we need to get the supply the circulating supply of stable coins way way up uh because you know otherwise we have to then take a higher share of stable coins. So we have to go from you know 8 to 9% to you know to 20%. And so stable coins are very much a growth a

tailwind for the space over the next 12 months. But we've seen the entry of uh web 2 players like PayPal. We've seen other big crypto players like Ripple enter the stable coin space. And then we've also seen uh Stripe, Revolute and other, you know, neo banks and fintexs, you know, suggest they would launch their own stable coin very soon. So I think uh bene crypto native businesses like Maple, but it's also going to drive a lot of adoption because now your friend who's not natively using crypto will be able to access crypto in his Revolute account or they would be able to make a payment using Stripe's infrastructure but in stable coins. So I think it's going to

be very beneficial for the space. Maple will look to work with all of the stable coin issuers. We see ourselves as an application layer built on top of them. We're not trying to make a stable coin ourselves. We want to be on the application layer that benefits from the infrastructure. >> Bitcoin changed the investment game. Now AI changes the strategy. Crypto's wild ride demands perfect timing. Selling before drops, buying as it climbs. While most investors panic, seller hope, a select few leverage a crucial edge, AI. Block trust IRA's trading platform spots market patterns with precision no human can match. Since 2020, their Animus AI platform has outperformed Bitcoin by over 250%.

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>> I've been very interested by seeing which products, which companies go for this thing of like we're going to build our own everything, our own L1, our own stable coin versus ones that are like, hey, this is what we do and we're going to focus on that. And it's been interesting to see those different strategies playing out. Um I I want to talk more about partnerships, integrations. Maple has been um very selective and I would say remarkably successful um at making selections for partners to integrate with. Um you guys started on Ethereum. Obviously you've gone to Salana, Arbitum, Lana, Plasma, and I believe that's the list so far. Um but I I'm sure that'll expand from there. But I'd love to know like what's that evaluation process for for selecting who to do these integrations

with like for you all? And what are like maybe highlight one of those is like something you're excited about that's come out of these integrations and unlocked opportunities for Maple? >> Yeah, sure. It's a good question. So, you get uh you you get a lot of pitches to go on other chains at the moment. And >> I'm shocked to hear that. I'm shocked >> and and I think one of the misconceptions from the chain side is that it's a very low lift particularly if it's EVM where you just effectively copy paste your contracts and then you and then you're good to go. uh but there's still a lot of BD effort that goes into getting deposits on the chain, coordinating with your clients. Uh if we take deposits on a chain, we then need borrowers on the chain as well. So there

it is a little bit more involved than just pasting and or you know build it and they will come. So how we've tried to prioritize these chain launches has been some reasonable estimate of what we think the AUM or the the total value locked available on that chain would be. So we'll look at stable coin supply, you know, projected stable coin supply over the first six months and and therefore how large can our presence be on that chain and then we'll look at you know are there any incentives provided by the foundation and for us I think one of the changes that we've made so previously we would have just gone and launched on a chain nowadays uh I think the reason for the success that we've had in the in the

launches on new chains has been that we've taken a partnership approach. So in Salana's case, we wanted to be uh warm out of the gate with you know Camino and Jupiter partnerships so that users could loop enhance their yield. Uh there was an existing venue that they could go to to access syrup USDC um or syrup USDT. And so I think that partnership approach has been critical to to our success, but also launching on chains where there are going to be a large stable coin presence. It doesn't make sense to go onto a chain if there's only 100 million of USDC because even if we got 10% of that, we're only going to be doing, you know, it's 10 million AUM.

So it's not going to move the needle. Um, Plasma I think was a really successful recent launch. So we've done that in partnership with Ave, uh, with MIDAS, uh, and with the Plasma Foundation. So the uh the vaults that opened up there filled within you know 200 million within a minute. So I think that was really successful and we would look to replicate that those partnerships when we go to other chains. So I think having one where you can allow looping is very is a very very strong partnership pitch that you can take to new chains whether it's you know Stripe launching their chain or Robin Hood launching their chain or you know or returning to to base or or some of these other chains

out there but that's what we look for. So strong partners, strong stable coin uh AUM or TVL and uh and then cooperation with the foundations. >> Gotcha. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense strategically there. Um, and I appreciate you kind of like spelling out your thought process on that because I think a lot of people see these partnerships and integrations, but they don't really know like what's going into it or what's driving that. So, that makes a lot of sense. It's helpful to understand. Um, I think >> fewer and better would be our mandate overall. I would say we're not trying to do these. We we want to be really focused and deliberate with where we do them.

>> Quality over quantity. Got it. That that makes a lot of sense. Um, I I I had a question on this. I think a lot of people uh in crypto especially like digital asset native investors uh have a little bit of let's say like uh lingering PTSD from last cycle um with with lenders and so forth. Um the flash crash of October 10th a lot of people are still like checking their tails being like somebody's gone bust somebody's going to blow up at some point. I'm just curious like from your perspective what was it like going through that flash crash? Was it like you know everything worked as business as usual? Was that a stress test for your systems? Like what was that experience like for Maple Finance?

>> Something like that is always a stress test. I think it's healthy. If we never had if we didn't have them, then you know it's it's like uh it's like building up, you know, antibodies in in your in your immune system. So we we need stress tests like that. Uh in Maple's case, I think we had about nine margin calls that afternoon and into the evening and all of our clients met their margin calls within 3 hours. So, I think it was uh I think it was a pretty strong showing from our side. Uh it was good because we got to test some of the new systems that we've been building in the wild and kick the tires on them. And so coming out of that, we then know what we need to improve, whether it's automated notifications on margin calls or whether

it's the way that, you know, the way that our system kind of represents things to our clients or adding self-service options for them. So there's always learnings coming out of out of stress stress test events like that. But overall things perform very well. So less than 3 hours to cure all margin calls. And the other thing that I think uh I was very interested in was typically I would expect there to be a lot of outflows as people just you know yank the you know pull the pull the rip cord first and then ask questions later. But what we found was actually Maple got 150 million in inflows over the 48 hours following October 10th, which told us that people were viewing Maple or the the Syrup USDC and Syrup USDT products

as kind of uh safe havens where they were confident in the risk management and the sustainability of the yield on those products. And so I think, you know, that was something that we found really encouraging. Uh but typically we budget to have two or three of these types of days a year. I think the last one was kind of the tariff stuff in in March, April and then the time before that was the yen carry unwind in August of last year. So typically, you know, typically we're expecting a couple of times a year and then everyone's all hands on deck when it occurs. Gotcha. I I I think that's really helpful to hear that things went well and you actually saw an increase in demand. Um that's, you know, a big vote of confidence from the market. I'm curious your thoughts on where we are in this dip. Are there

particular like unique opportunities that come during a like a bearish period like this versus a bull run that Maple takes advantage of or is it just like you said like when people are looking for a stable place and safe place to earn yield in crypto that they come to you when when the bull run is taking a breather like or are there like other opportunities for Maple that come during these kinds of periods? It's it's it's an interesting question because our business is definitely you know it's definitely still subject to to business cycles. You know lending is inherently like that because you have debt and credit cycles. U however the opportunities we would see are that some of our other peer lenders might pull back in appetite. We still want to

have very tight credit underwriting standards, but when something like this happens, we might look to peel customers away from kind of a shaky competitor. Uh, you know, a competitor is looking at maybe not renewing a customer's loan and we want that customer. Well, we might try and, you know, pitch them on coming across to us. So particularly if we have a strong balance sheet because we're not seeing outflows whereas some of our competitors who might have you know let's say uh less funding diversity or they're more at risk of one of their funders pulling you know pulling capital from them then they can't extend commitments whereas we can be pretty you know we can pitch for the business from a position of strength because we we're seeing inflows and we have very sticky

capital. So, it allows us to pick up bigger and better customers who otherwise might be with a Coinbase or one of the other large lenders in the space. The other thing we do is uh we're always kind of revisiting which collateral we would lend against. And one of the things we did do after October 10th is we we kind of took a few, you know, different tokens off of the collateral list that we would lend against. So, we took it as an opportunity to kind of tighten up and go after bigger clients and and kind of consolidate our our lending book there. >> Gotcha. Yeah. I think that's a that's a good way to to deal with those situations. Look for opportunities, clients to win.

>> You always want to be hoarding hoarding cash in kind of downturns so that you have the opportunity to to pick up business that your your your competitors won't. >> I think I'm going to update my LinkedIn profile to just say hoarding cash. Um, okay. I think I I want to hear some of your thoughts on innovation, regulation, and sort of the future of onchain asset management here. Uh, and I wanted to start with AI here at Milk Road. We've been very interested at this or in this intersection between artificial intelligence, digital assets. Um, but I think that there's been a struggle to find sort of some product market fit there. Um, but I'm I'm always curious how people are thinking about this, how they're leveraging AI. How is AI making an impact on onchain asset management at Maple Finance now? And how do you see

that playing out in the future? >> It's a good question. I think a lot of people had this idea that uh overnight you kind of flick a switch and then we would have AI running our entire business, which in Maple's case would be originating loans, doing all the margin calls, processing all the collateral. And uh it's not the case. Um however, there is real traction happening on the AI front. So one of the teams that we have liked working with recently has been Bit Pulse. Uh, so I'll give them a shout out, but these guys do uh they use AI for risk management software. And so for us, we have to, you know, we do collateralized lending. And so we always have to be on the lookout for changes in

the volatility of Bitcoin, ETH, Salana, XRP, any of the assets that we lend against. And that helps us set buffers. So where do we margin call a client? Where do we liquidate a client? And what kind of concentration could we do to a single client? And what Bit Pulse has enabled us to do is radically shrink the amount of time it takes to kind of underwrite a new loan because we can do historical back testing based on the volatility of the asset. And we can work out the probability that we would have had to margin call that client over the last year and the probability over the next year. So it's it's it's like a force multiplier for the guys that we have on the team that enables them to do

their job better. And now every morning I get a digest from Bit Pulse that says here's the health of all of the collateral in the book. Uh here's the the level of volatility. Here's where you know your kind of dormant risks lie and what you should be keeping an eye on. That's what I would call phase one. Then as we get to phase two, we'll allow it to start making decisions for the business. It may not be that particular use case but it would be you know sizing of the loans of the book. Then it might be then a stage three might be you know automatically prepping collateral if we think we're getting into a period of volatility and sending out notifications to our client. So I'd say we're we're in the early innings. We're in phase one at

the moment. But over time, where we at Maple hope to use AI is very much for automated risk management and and really ensuring that we're getting the most out of our portfolio and delivering the best yield to our clients at the best risk adjusted rates. >> That's really interesting and I agree with you. There's there's like kind of a big gulf between where we are now and what AI can help with and where that's going to be going. So, it's interesting to see how that's going to scale from here. Um, I I I'm interested to get your thoughts on this. Paul Atkins, the the chairman of the US SEC, said that there's going to be an innovation exemption coming in January um for digital asset firms and and people doing business in the digital asset industry.

Uh and I'm curious if if Maple is excited about this and what what products, what opportunities that you guys might try to bring to market or or launch new things or just, you know, play in the US sandbox, so to speak, um once this exemption is in place in January, like what are your thoughts on that? What what might you guys uh be able to unlock with that? Well, one I I applaud the effort. I think it's uh you know, the only way for innovation to go forward is you do need to drop the cost of compliance and and the regulatory side of launching new products because startups are the ones who are, you know, they have the most incentive to offer, you know, good competitive new products.

However, they also have the least balance sheet wherewithal to go and spend a million dollars on lobbying. uh JP Morgan, it's very easy for them to spend a million dollars on lobbying. It's very difficult for someone like us to. So products that we would look to launch, I mean we have syrup USDC and syrup USDT are both only available outside the US. So these are effectively retail D5 first yield products. Uh we would love to be able to offer something like that even if in just a limited form in the US or or to US users. We think it's very battle tested now. So something like that would be kind of top of our list. Uh, and then we look at, you know, we we've looked at, uh, whether we could have a kind of, you know, whether it's like a permissionless

product out there as well. I think it's probably a little bit further away. There's there's a few kinks to be worked out there. Uh, but first and foremost, I'd love to offer our D5 friendly versions of of our products. So, Syrup USDC and Syrup USDT in the US. Longer term though we've looked at, you know, whether there's it's possible to do a retail permissionless product or could you have other horizontal things like Bitcoin backed mortgages. Uh particularly, you know, my view has been that Gen Z is uh is not going to be real estate first in the same way that boomers were. That instead they would, you know, they're they're much more on the cutting edge of adopting crypto in their portfolios. And so they might look to leverage Bitcoin wealth in order to

fund things like house deposits or or home loans in future. So there's 50 million Americans who hold Bitcoin. It's, you know, it's it's growing at anywhere from 20 to 40% a year. So I think we want to, you know, we want to be capitalizing on that trend and being able to offer, you know, more and more kind of Bitcoin related lending products to uh to the US. >> Gotcha. Yeah. I'm excited to see how this plays out, too. Um, yeah. So, I'm rooting for you guys um to get some clarity there. Speaking of clarity, um the Clarity Act is still being discussed in Congress. Um and there's been a lot of attention on this and I'm curious your thoughts on this. Do you think that this market structure bill would give a lot of like, you know, bullish momentum to Maple or do you think this unlocks a

huge wave of new competitors coming into the space? What are your thoughts on this? How big of a of a deal would this be for Maples business if the Clarity Act comes through? I think it'd be really beneficial for Maples's business. Uh it would unlock a wave of of kind of new momentum and it would give us the ability to work with more traditional players who would have less reticence about doing things with with the crypto industry. The problem or the the double-edged sword there is that you can't have a wave of new momentum come in without in you know without interest from competitors because momentum necessarily means that there have to be competitors interested in what you're doing. So the answer is it brings both but I think net net the the benefits outweigh the the drawbacks. Uh

I think the key thing I have read the latest draft of the of the clarity act. So I think uh some of the key things that are encouraging are the carve out for defi and and for kind of permissionless governance. Also the set of sort of basic disclosures. So if somebody want like us wanted to offer a product to retail, there's at least a shopping list of of kind of basic disclosures that we would have to meet if we wanted to offer our stable coin yield product to them for example you know how the risk is managed where the assets are held what kind of rights and obligations that uh they they have and we have so I think that's going to be very beneficial for the space uh best estimate is that this is slated for sometime in 2026 at this stage

>> right yeah and I think that there will be, you know, a plethora of things that come out of this bill in terms of impacts. Um, but I agree it's it's mostly constructive and I'm I'm excited to see where it leads to. Um, I wanted to get your thoughts on something else. The CEO of my old firm, Black Rockck, was interviewed in The Economist this week about and he's they're Black Rockck's like very all in on this uh asset tokenization trend. Exactly. Um, and I'm curious your thoughts on this as as a development in like the the digital asset space. How do you see this benefiting Maple? Does this is there does this all unlock more new products that you guys might want to like explore? Do you think this is like Yeah, just talk about that because there's a lot of Trady firms that are coming in

and I'm curious to see are they going to adopt like cryptonative um platforms and and products or are they going to like build all of their own and like what does tokenization actually look like when it actually gets out into the wild? >> It's Yeah, it's uh it's uh >> Sorry, that's like five questions at once. >> No, no, I don't. Yeah. Yeah, there's there's a bit to unpack there. I'm very bullish over the medium to long term on on tokenization and I think it's it's undoubtedly very good for Larry Frink's business uh because it's additional distribution for existing fund products.

So he has a bunch of funds and if he can wrap them in tokens, his idea is that he can then increase the utility of them and reach a marginal you know Gen Z investor who has otherwise hasn't thought about buying Black Rockck phones uh and they can buy them in smaller size who reduces back office cost. So that's that's the reason a lot of traditional asset managers are interested in it. What I haven't seen is the corresponding interest from the marginal Gen Z buyer or investor. that Gen Z investor has a Coinbase account and they probably have an onchain wallet and they're interested in Bitcoin because they think that the old system is a scam. They're not really out there hankering to buy the latest private credit fund or uh you know XYZ Trafi instrument. They've opted out of

that system to buy Bitcoin because they think the rest of the system is a scam. So the idea that they're just going to buy it because there's now a tokenized version of it I think has been a little bit shortsighted. Uh that being said, it is an opportunity for us because we lend against currently tokens but in future tokenized assets. We've done loans before against the Grayscale Bitcoin fund. And so the answer is it gives us more inventory to hold as collateral and to lend against. So we would absolutely view it as beneficial for our business. And notwithstanding the fact that JP Morgan already does loans against funds, doing loans against tokenized funds is a different operational problem and it lends itself to our expertise. So it

creates opportunities for us to partner with folks like that. But I would say the the issue that I still see at the moment is we're waiting for the buy side demand to show up. or waiting for institutions to say, "Hey, I really liked this Black Rockck fund when I could buy it in a Charles Schwab brokerage account." And I really like it as well when I can have the tokenized version of that that I can hold in my Coinbase Prime or my Robin Hood account or, you know, XY Z other other venue for this. So, that's that's been the gap, but I think that that's why I say medium-term to long-term rather than shortterm uh in in that caveat.

>> Sure. Tokenized financial products are the future, but there is a big sticking point. They all need to speak to each other. This is a tough problem to solve, but chain link does exactly that. It's the universal language for financial markets, linking Wall Street to web3, banks to blockchain, and so much more. See how chain link is linking the world by going to milkroad.com/chainlink. Uh, bringing this back to I appreciate the thoughts on that. Bringing this back to Maple here. Um I I'm curious where you're putting most of your efforts on business development because you know a few times you talked about finding demand from the the marginal user and and and and sourcing that in the market.

Um what does that look like for Maple? Where are you putting those efforts? How are you reaching new customers, new users? What does that process look like for you guys right now? >> It's a good question. For us, we've been putting a lot of effort into the DeFi distribution. So we've had very strong partnerships uh recently with you know new chains like plasma uh blue chip defy protocols like Ave and uh and the sky ecosystem. So we want to continue to expand that D5 presence of ours. In tandem we are prepping for uh the entry of trad. So we want to be ahead of the competition and so one of the things we're working on is the first cryptobacked securitization at the moment. So we're we're excited about this class of product. We think that,

you know, if you can get seven, you know, in the the six and a half to 7% yield range for Bitcoin backed loans and you can package these in an investment grade note or asset and get a rating on it, then we think that there will be a lot of Trafi buyers for for that fixed income uh paper that gives us diversity where we have really good distribution in in DeFi, but we can parlay that to getting really good distribution in tradition among traditional asset managers. So that's been a big focus for us for 2026. But we're going to continue to do launch on new chains, new DeFi integrations for syrup USDC and syrup USDT. And our target is ultimately to

get to over 100 million ARR in 2026. So for us that looks like we need to have you know north of 10 billion in deposits which means really north of 20 to 25 billion in kind of aum for that to happen. So that's like that's our northstar as a team for next year. And it means we've got to bring tradi in. We've got to do better with uh with defi players as well. So more stable coins, more chains, more protocols. >> Yeah. And I think that that focus on DeFi is really encouraging to me to hear because um it's it a lot of people I feel like are more focused on the Trady side, but I'm I'm glad to hear you're still still all in on that. Um I want to hear your thoughts on building a moat

around Maples's business. As we've discussed, there's a lot of great things happening in regulatory spaces about, you know, making this a space that's it's clear for businesses to do business in and to build new things. There will be competition. How do you go about thinking around about protecting Maple's business and and building a moat around that for the long term? >> It's it's something we think about a lot and our thinking is probably evolved. So when we started Maple originally in 2019 and then first launched it in 2021 uh we had the idea of being a platform and being infrastructure and I think platforms Airbnb Uber asset light network effects was all the rage back then but over time you know what I've observed in my own kind of reading of

startup history is that you need some degree of vertical integration to protect your margins and protect your business and and give yourself balance sheet strength. Apple is vertically integrated. Tesla is vertically integrated. SpaceX is vertically integrated. Amazon is even vertically integrated. Amazon doesn't do fulfillment through, you know, some other warehouse provider or some other delivery firm. They developed Amazon Logistics. And so, Maple originally was a platform where we had other risk managers. We call them delegates. And nowadays, you'd probably call them curators or vault managers, but we brought that inhouse and started doing it ourselves. And that gave us better pricing power meant we had more control over the end product and could get to

market faster. So our thinking in terms of moat has evolved from it's thinking it was better to be an asset like platform to now it's better to be you know kind of vertically integrated. You want to control the creation, management and distribution of your products. So that's where we think the moat comes in. How have we affected a moat and where is our moat visible today? So, you know, why does a platform like Aveir USDC and Syrup US produce a higher yield than other collateral that's out there and so that's a win-win for A and for us we get more AUM they get uh to to boost the utilization uh because if you have

collateral with a higher yield it becomes more of an incentive to borrow against it and loop it on um on Ave. But the reason we're able to get those high yields is we allow we focus on institutional clients and so we give them the ability to post native Bitcoin. They don't have to wrap it. We give them the ability to put it in triparty custody so they don't have to take our credit risk. They can put it in a Anchorage or BitGo or one of the others. And then we do uh more borrower friendly liquidations. So in DeFi often if you hit a liquidation threshold you get 100% of your collateral is liquidated and there's some kind of penalty.

We would only liquidate we give you a margin call level and then you've got anywhere from 12 to 24 hours to post. Then if you hit a liquidation level we would liquidate you back to your initial LTV and then we don't charge a penalty. So we've protected our users. Um however we haven't nuked their collateral and then we haven't charged them an additional penalty. So it makes it very friendly and good for institutions to use us and in turn they're willing to pay a little bit more for it and that makes us then a great fit for integrations on Ave and Oiler and Morpho and lending protocols and uh and that's that's that's been our niche so far this year and kind of what

has propelled a lot of the growth. It's really interesting to hear you describe how you're creating value and aligned incentives for so many different players and stakeholders in the process and in the market. Um really interesting stuff. Sid, thanks so much for being on the Milk Road Show and sharing all this with us. I want to end with one more question here. Um this is maybe the most bullish I think I've ever seen Tradfi and institutions on digital assets and at the same time probably the most bearish I've ever seen retail. Uh and a lot of our audience are retail investors who are feeling burnt out, frustrated, um and like you know a lot of negative things about about the market right now.

Um give us some hopeium here. What are you most bullish on for 2026? What are you most excited about and and why should people be uh anticipating a green year in 2026 and not a year-long doldrums of of crypto winter? >> Tough tough tough questions to end on. So I think uh my conviction in in crypto is unshaken and I think the fact that we had the Genius Act come through this year enabling stable coins and that we look like we have the market structure bill so the clarity act come through in 2026 I think is very bullish for everyone in the space and retail should take heart there. So, if there are more uh if there are more stable coins, one theory is that it'll trickle down into

purchasing power for alts and for other large caps. So, I think that will ultimately benefit retail. And then the other thing is that you're seeing more access to crypto trading. Uh so, you know, soon it will be enabled in your Revolute account or uh you know, already it's in Robin Hood, but it'll be enabled in more kind of neo bank accounts. So you'll have more people actively able to trade crypto, you will have more stable coins there which are primarily you know today used to purchase crypto and uh and so I think you know notwithstanding that price action this year has been a little bit tough and most coins have kind of given up all of their gains. I think if you stay the course in 2026, I'm very optimistic that um you know that

persistence and resilience will be rewarded by the market for uh for retail. >> Persistence and resilience will be rewarded is a very inspiring quote to end on. Sid, thanks so much for being here. Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online? >> Uh perfect. So I am as you as you can see the handle there. So I am syrups onx. So, you know, feel free to uh to follow or to uh to reach out there. We are Maple Finance, one word on X. And we try and be pretty active. And then our website is maple.inance. So, for anyone who wants to kick the tires on a product or or take it for a test drive, feel free to go to maple maple.inance.

>> Well, thanks so much for being here. I appreciate you pouring syrup on everything in the in the market for us today. Um so, yeah, thanks for being on the Milk Road Show, Sid. It was great to talk to you today. >> Thanks for having me, John. It's my pleasure. Absolutely. And it was great to have all of you with us today, too. Uh, so we hope you learned something today. Until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of the Milkro Show. Thanks for being here, everyone. Bye. If y'all are making swaps or trades right now, highly recommend you check out Milkroad Swap. This is a DEX that we built in partnership with Cow Protocol.

Why did we build it? Not to make money. Just honestly, so we could have a place to do our swaps for the lowest fees that we could find. This is the fees on Ethereum, Arbitum, and BAS are only 0.15% fees. Uh this is a huge difference from uh other centralized exchanges that charge half a percent or even up to 1.2% fees on their swaps. Also, you can swap on Salana all at swap.mmillgrow.com. Check it out today. You won't be upset. And you can join me in my favorite place to make swaps on chain. Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Road daily and pro newsletters and start investing

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