Maple mpl

To see Collective Shift’s analysis, sign up for our membership!

Maple Finance (Maple) is a decentralised corporate debt marketplace that grants institutions access to capital. It was built by Maple Labs Pty Ltd (Maple Labs, the Team) and is available on the following blockchains: Ethereum, Solana and Base.

After going live on Ethereum in May 2021, Maple spent the first couple of years focused solely on under-collateralised onchain lending, where demand to borrow came from crypto businesses wanting to access capital to fund growth and operations.

After the crypto credit crunch of 2022—where various large centralised lenders went bankrupt—Maple expanded into overcollateralised lending and real-world assets (RWAs), starting with U.S. Treasuries.

How Maple makes money: The Maple treasury receives 50% of establishment fees paid by borrowers.

The Maple ecosystem consists of three main participants:

Borrowers are institutions that want to borrow capital to fund business growth and operations. They negotiate loan terms with pool delegates, who fund the loans with capital from the pools they manage. The loan is deployed to Ethereum and activates after the borrower posts the required collateral.

Liquidity providers (LPs) add capital to pools to earn yield. Pool delegates use the capital in these pools to underwrite vetted borrowers and earn interest. When choosing a pool to deposit into, an LP will often consider factors such as the past performance of pool delegates and management fees.

Pool delegates evaluate prospective borrowers, negotiate loan terms and manage liquidity pools. They earn management fees for this work. To financially align incentives with LPs, pool delegates must post a certain amount of MPL and USDC into the pool they are managing (i.e. first-loss capital). The Maple team approves pool delegates based on factors such as their professional background and reputation.

The Maple Token (MPL) is an ERC-20 token powering the Maple ecosystem. It has a maximum supply of 10 million.

There is a secondary ERC-20 token, xMPL, which MPL holders get if they stake their MPL. Holders of xMPL are able to participate in governance. When the Maple protocol’s monthly revenue exceeds its operating expenses, the excess revenue is used to buy MPL on the open market. This MPL is then evenly distributed to xMPL. As of this writing, Maple has yet to generate any excess monthly revenue.

MPL has four core functions:

1. Governance: Enables holders to participate in governance via Maple DAO, by submitting and voting on proposed changes to the protocol, such as fee levels and treasury management.
2. Fees: Holders share in fee revenues by depositing Balancer Pool Tokens (BPTs) into a pool of their choice, providing a credit-risk buffer for LPs. In turn, holders earn 10% of the interest from pools when MPL is staked. (Staking is not necessary for MPL holders to earn their share of the establishment fee.)
3. Staking: MPL is staked by holders to provide a reserve of capital to a liquidity pool of their choice, in exchange for yield. Pool delegates and MPL holders stake by depositing a combination of MPL and stablecoins into a MPL:USDC Balancer pool, which gives the user BPTs.
4. Rewards: Liquidity mining rewards paid in MPL.

MPL was initially distributed as follows: treasury (14%), seed investors (26%), public auction (5%), liquidity mining (30%), and the Team and advisors (25%).

Notably, MPL’s tokenomics are set to be upgraded relatively soon, assuming the proposal is approved by the DAO. Maple Labs flagged its intention to propose a tokenomics upgrade in early October 2023. As of this writing, a proposal has yet to be submitted.