Maple Solana intends to grow its fund to $300 million by the end of 2022 and to offer unsecured loans totaling up to $1 billion.
Maple Finance, a decentralized marketplace for corporate debt serving institutional borrowers, has expanded its presence to Solana to enable financing for projects built on the smart-contract blockchain.
Already available on Ethereum, the marketplace is the first multi-chain capital platform. It also introduces institutionally oriented unsecured lending for projects within the Solana ecosystem.
Scaling the Solana ecosystem
Maple Solana says it is launching with a $45 million fund dedicated to unsecured loans. The team plans to grow that fund over the coming months, targeting $300 million by year-end.
Quinn Barry, head of Maple Solana, said the goal is to accelerate Solana’s ecosystem expansion by providing on-chain capital market infrastructure.
“Over the next three months, we expect to bring more than $300 million of liquidity to Solana. We will soon onboard another credit specialist to the platform and will share additional details about how liquidity protocols are already using Maple’s infrastructure as a launchpad on Solana,” he added.
Sid Powell, CEO and co-founder of Maple Finance, commented:
“Building the first multi-chain solution for the capital markets has attracted and will continue to attract high-quality lenders and borrowers, create unprecedented growth opportunities for innovators building on Solana, and enable the broader industry to thrive.”
Maple Solana aims to originate up to $1 billion in loans, the crypto capital network said in an announcement offering the service on Ethereum as well. The project also plans to launch SYRUP, a governance token that will provide similar functionality to the Ethereum-based MPL token.
X-Margin becomes the pool’s first delegate
As part of its effort to transform capital markets through technology on Solana, Maple Solana has secured data-driven lending firm X-Margin as the pool’s first delegate.
The company will serve as the initial delegate to the pool, and its lending operations have attracted substantial deposits from three major partners. Payments and financial services provider Circle contributed $10 million, while digital asset manager CoinShares added $20 million.
X-Margin also received $10 million from native Solana backers and is open to additional deposits of up to $5 million in USDC to complete the $45 million launch fund.
Loans for crypto blue-chips
X-Margin will leverage its privacy-preserving credit infrastructure and underwriting expertise alongside Maple’s on-chain credit facility to provide loans to some of the largest borrowers in the crypto space.
Darshan Vaidya, CEO of X-Margin, said:
“Maple’s multi-chain infrastructure continues to be innovative for institutional credit in crypto. X-Margin’s privacy-preserving lending platform fits naturally into this approach, helping to scale a more transparent, data-driven credit market across DeFi and CeFi.”
Borrowers will be required to comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) standards. These compliance measures aim to meet regulatory expectations and ensure loans are extended to reputable projects.