Maple Finance ranks as second-largest crypto lender behind Tether

Somewhere between the chaos of the 2022 credit blowups and today’s maturing DeFi landscape, Maple Finance quietly rebuilt itself into the second-largest institutional crypto lender on the planet, trailing only Tether. The platform currently holds active loans of around $1.9B, with total value locked ranging between $2.4B and $5B depending on how you count assets under management. Since launching, Maple has originated somewhere between $15B and $22B in cumulative loans, with a repayment rate exceeding 99% and no reported losses on overcollateralized positions. From the ashes of uncollateralized lending When crypto credit markets collapsed in 2022, the casualties included firms like Celsius, BlockFi, and Genesis, all of which had extended undercollateralized loans to counterparties that turned out to be far riskier than advertised. Maple had its own exposure to the uncollateralized lending model, and the fallout was visible. CEO Sid Powell then made a deliberate, structural pivot: away from trust-based lending toward secured, overcollateralized positions. The kind of lending that, when a borrower defaults, there is actually something to recover. Powell co-founded Maple and has been t...