Maple Finance

SYRUP is the token of Maple Finance, an institutional lending protocol that has operated in decentralized finance since 2021. Maple connects lenders seeking yield with institutional borrowers, and the protocol positions itself as a bridge between institutional credit practices and on-chain settlement.

How Maple works

Maple's lending engine issues loans to institutional borrowers, with the current model centred on overcollateralized lending backed by digital assets. Lenders deposit capital into pools and earn yield from the interest paid by borrowers. Syrup is the protocol's permissionless product line, which opens access to the same lending engine without the eligibility gating that applied to Maple's earlier institutional pools, and it integrates with the broader DeFi ecosystem including liquidity venues on Ethereum and Base.

The SYRUP token replaced Maple's earlier MPL token through a conversion, and it functions as the governance and staking asset of the protocol. There is no fixed maximum supply published in the available data; total supply is roughly 1.24 billion tokens with about 1.17 billion in circulation.

Role in the ecosystem

Maple operates in the on-chain credit segment, which went through a difficult period in 2022 when undercollateralized lending to trading firms produced defaults across several protocols. Maple subsequently reoriented toward overcollateralized structures. The protocol is categorised under real-world assets and lending, and it is one of the more established names in institutional DeFi lending. Its performance is tied to demand for borrowing against digital assets and to the credit quality of its borrower base. Loan concentration is worth examining as well, since a lending protocol with few large borrowers behaves very differently under stress from one with a broad book.