• Up-to-date financial ratio’s of borrowers point to solid balance sheets across the board
• Full visibility on loan repayment schedules

Current market conditions are driving an increased demand for liquidity from both Borrowers and Lenders. This behaviour is expected as demand for liquidity becomes greater in these markets with Lenders requesting withdrawals to cover liabilities and/or jump at market opportunities.

On top of that, we observe an increased demand from Borrowers requesting loans to trade the elevated volatility in the market, facing cancellations of open-tenor lines from CeFi Lenders who need to meet withdrawals. This proves our conviction that CeFi lending as practised till now is unsustainable because of at-call deposits. This creates an opportunity for DeFi protocols like Maple Finance, where loans are issued on-chain and are immutable. Fixed-term loans also come with a certain premium, having delivered superior returns to Lenders since the launch of our pool mid 2021. In the meantime, we have also received the feedback that due to the abrupt cancellation by CeFi Lenders, fixed term loans will gain importance to market makers in the future.

Ever since the LUNA/UST situation unfolded, the team at Maple has been proactively communicating on the developments: see the following statement.
In addition, we have been in close communication with all Borrowers for information on any exposure to affected market participants i.e. Celsius, 3AC as well as stETH. The information received from Borrowers indicates that across our loan book, direct market exposure has been very limited.

As we will discuss in more detail in this post, the parties borrowing from our pools are for the most part market making firms with minimal directional exposure (“delta-neutral”) to the underlying crypto assets. They deploy high-frequency trading arbitrage strategies to take advantage of (small) price inefficiencies. In our USDC pool, these market makers make up 75% of our loan book with the other 25% being more diversified firms. In our wETH pool the balance is about 55/45. Market making still makes up a large portion of their diversified activities but they also engage in for example staking.

Maven 11 USDC pool borrower concentration

Maven 11 wETH pool borrower concentration

Healthy loan book with -unchanged- comfortable leverage ratios
Our credit underwriting process focuses extensively on the financial health of our counterparties and we monitor this regularly.
In the days following the 3AC fallout we have surveyed all our Borrowers for their most up-to-date flash figures (debt/equity, debt/AuM, performance etc.) to compare their current financial situation versus the end of April (pre-Luna/UST).
The feedback we received from Borrowers indicates that they were able to take advantage of increased volatility and growing inefficiencies on the market.

Below are two charts on the changes in our USDC loan book to the weighted average Debt / Assets (“D/A”) and Debt / Equity (“D/E”) from the end of April 2022 to the 22nd of June 2022. All of our Borrowers have provided up-to-date information on their aggregate data to emphasise how strong and healthy their financial positions are, despite the uncertainty of the current period in the lending space. The overall state of the USDC loan book is in line with our historical bandwidth with only a slight increase of 6% of operating leverage across the institutions currently borrowing from our pool, however the Debt / Assets ratio still sits below 50%. The fact that leverage has remained in check and not spiked provides evidence that the market makers have continued to operate profitably during times of turmoil.

Loan repayment schedule
From the start, Maple Finance has set out to be the most transparent institutional lending protocol in DeFi by providing Lenders in the various available pools access to the diversified loan books managed by pool delegates such as Maven 11. It has an appealing product-market fit due to the financing security for Borrowers through the issuance of fixed term debt as well as planable yield for liquidity providers who are not exposed to the risk of overnight rate changes or cuts in contrast to CeFi.

We recognise and understand that the uncertainty caused by recent events in the market calls for even more visibility. Even though all current (and past) loans and their respective terms are already accessible on Maple Finance (app.maple.finance), we want to contribute to further education and provide a detailed overview of the full repayment schedule in pursuit of absolute visibility on the liquidity positions of the Maven 11 USDC & wETH pools.

Loan repayment chart Maven 11 USDC pool

Loan repayment chart Maven 11 wETH pool

We have also included past and future interest obligations that point towards a spotless historic payment discipline which is especially relevant from “Luna/UST” onwards.

Loan repayment schedule Maven 11 USDC pool

Loan repayment schedule Maven 11 wETH pool

Withdrawal procedure
Withdrawal requests are subject to available cash in the pool and are executed on a first-come-first-serve basis (automatically through the smart contracts). For more information on managing liquidity and the withdrawal process please also refer to this communication by Maple Finance.

As one can expect in the light of the Celsius freezing deposits announcement and the uncertainty around the total 3AC impact we have received higher than usual withdrawal requests that at time of writing outweigh the available cash at hand in the pool because of fixed-term loan maturities.

Every $ that has been deposited in our pools is accounted for either in cash or lent out for 90 or 180 days to Borrowers with solid balance sheets (see above) and without any exposure to either Celsius or 3AC. There have been no missed payments in our pools and we have not received any indications that Borrowers in our pools will not fulfill their obligations to repay (interest on) their loans.

However, as can be seen in the loan repayment overview, the duration of some outstanding loans runs well into Q3 and these are fixed-term loans so they cannot be called back earlier.

It may therefore happen that we cannot satisfy all withdrawal requests immediately; a scenario that we acknowledge can cause an inconvenient situation for some Lenders but is unfortunately inherent to the nature of the protocol and the tenors of the loans.

As loans mature over the coming weeks, Borrower repayments will increase the available capital in the pools that can then be withdrawn by Lenders. Lenders will continue to earn interest and MPL rewards in the meantime.

As always the team at Maven 11 are available to answer any questions. Please reach out to Victor van Eijk if you would like to schedule a call: victor@maven11.com