Research summary
ADVERSE RESEARCH ASSESSMENT, and re-argued in full at this review because the product changed and the rejection's grounds had to change with it. Maple today is not the Maple that failed in 2022. Its docs say every loan behind syrupUSDC, syrupUSDT, and syrupUSDG is overcollateralized with liquid digital assets; third parties report ratios above 150% (OAK Research). Underwriting moved in-house to Maple Direct, with 24-hour margin calls and contractual liquidation levels; the third-party pool-delegate model that produced the 2022 losses is gone from the core products. The scale is real: Maple reports $4.6B AUM at H1 2026, up 81% year over year, and put syrupUSDC supply near $2.8B in June 2026, while DefiLlama shows $2.39B on-chain TVL with $1.92B borrowed at the 2026-08-14 review. Credit the redesign honestly: it fixed underwriting. What it did instead is concentrate the risk in the operator, and nothing about the operator can be verified from outside. Collateral does not sit in protocol contracts; it sits with off-chain custodians (BitGo, Copper, Hex Trust, Kraken Financial, per Maple and third-party reporting). Margining runs on Maple's private three-feed alert system and liquidation is a manual process through OTC desks, all invisible on-chain. The High Yield product, in Maple's own docs, redeploys collateral into staking and secured lending, so that collateral must be recalled before it can be liquidated. A Security Admin can pause every function, and the GovernorTimelock behind upgrades, only added in September 2025, is managed by a multisig whose threshold and signers are unpublished. Withdrawals queue behind a stated 30-day ceiling, processed by Maple Direct. And the claim of no defaults since 2023, across $20B+ of originations, is Maple's own figure relayed by third parties; no independent loan-tape audit exists, and an impairment workout would not show as a default. The 2022 record stays because it prices what trusting an operator's representations can cost. On 2022-12-05 Orthogonal Trading defaulted on $36M across eight loans, about 30% of all active loans: $31M in the M11 USDC pool, where reporting at the time put remaining lenders' losses near 80%, plus $5M (3,900 wETH) in the M11 wETH pool. Maple expected to recover about $2.5M of the $36M. Orthogonal had told lenders in November its FTX exposure was about $2.5M; on December 3 it disclosed far more. Babel Finance had already defaulted that July, a $7.9M loss, a 3.8% haircut on its pool. One firm now underwrites, prices, margins, liquidates, and pays out. A client cannot hold this and also hold the belief that their downside is observable. The rejection extends to syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT wherever they are accepted as collateral, or it leaks back in through the side door.
Observable review triggers
- The Governor multisig's signers and threshold are published and every privileged action runs through the timelock
- Collateral custody and margining become verifiable: positions on-chain, or independent attestations of custodian balances and margin events
- Rehypothecation of borrower collateral ends, or is ring-fenced entirely outside the products under consideration
- Maple publishes a full independently audited default, impairment, and loss record covering 2023 onward
Facts on file
- Research assessment
- Adverse
- Client selection
- Not considered
- Exposure
- stable lending
- Chains examined
- Ethereum
- Reviewed
- Next review