Maven11 launches wETH lending-pool at Maple Finance

Maven 11 is actively involved in Maple Finance, a corporate credit platform on the Ethereum blockchain. Besides being an investor in Maple Finance, Maven 11 also actively contributed to the growth of the protocol by becoming the second pool delegate for a USDC denominated pool on the platform. The Maven 11 x Maple Finance relationship began back in 2020 and, from that time onwards, both firms have been working together to find ways that deepen the partnership, expand the Maple product and grow the digital economy together.

Maple Finance is a decentralised corporate-credit platform for credit experts to run lending businesses. Pools are managed by Pool Delegates — experienced portfolio managers with credit underwriting expertise. Lenders can deposit their funds into either permissioned or permissionless lending pools. Borrowers are blue-chip crypto institutions needing capital to fund their business operations — Pool Delegates can provide undercollateralized loans to these borrowers in an industry where overcollateralized lending is still the standard.

Because of the unique features of Maple Finance, including its ability to provide and track on-chain history of its borrowers, Maple has attracted many well-known and highly reputable institutions that, as of March 2022, brought the protocol to originate more than $870 million in loans since launching in May 2021.

Maven 11 created a lending division within the firm to successfully launch a USDC denominated pool in July 2021. The team at Maven 11 consists of 3 FTE and 1 advisor with over 40 years combined experience in asset management, capital markets and credit origination / risk management. Maven 11’s role as Pool Delegate is to source borrowers, assess their creditworthiness by performing due diligence and manage a diversified portfolio of loans ensuring credit quality.

While we only took up our role of Pool Delegate in July 2021, we’ve managed to issue more than $280 million in loans thus far from our USDC pool and to reach a Total Value Locked (TVL) of $225 million in March 2022, after launching with just $21 million TVL less than a year ago.

Maven 11 is proudly actively involved in the DeFi space and showcases an excellent reputation among the public. Its active collaborations with different DAOs, including Merit Circle and Keeper, led the communities to participate in the Maple project by depositing part of their DAO’s stablecoins in the pool managed by us as part of their treasury diversification strategy for their idle assets. The communities welcomed the proposals for the lending opportunity as they actively participated in AMA sessions held on their respective Discord servers. Together with Maple representatives, we walked DAO’s members through our origination and risk management practices while looking forward to their comments and suggestions to improve the partnership.

Maple Finance has been growing at an incredible pace in the latest months expanding the number of pools and now has 6 liquidity pools live on the platform. Considering the success and the fast-paced growth of our USDC pool, in which liquidity providers have earned more than $4.5 million in interest, Maven 11 is taking a further step with its involvement in Maple Finance and launching the first permissionless pool on the platform with wrapped Ether (wETH) as asset base.

Our decision to launch a new pool was influenced by the requests of our investors to have an unexplored opportunity to lend wETH to institutions, currently missing in the DeFi space, and by our borrowers’ demand to increase the size of their total allocation in ETH for their market neutral trading strategies. Moreover, Maven 11 is creating a suitable opportunity for DAOs and their idle ETH as the pool can be seen as part of their treasury diversification strategies to generate return without reducing their total exposure to the main asset.

Eventually, the wETH pool should generate an APY in the range 8%-10% for investors, which approximately includes 4% of wETH and the remainder in MPL token, depending on the market conditions.

For the wETH pool, the initial borrowers will consist of existing borrowers on Maple Finance that are fully KYC’ed and have built credit history on the platform, such as Amber Group and Bastion Trading. At launch, there will be 4 market makers/trading firms that will borrow the initial liquidity from the pool to perform their usual market-neutral trading strategies such as arbitrage or cash and carry. The use of funds by the borrowers will be in line with the strategies performed in the existing USDC pool. Finally, all of the initial loans will have a tenor of 90 or 180 days.

The new Pool will be open for deposits from whitelisted lenders starting today Monday 7th of March. This Wednesday, the pool will open to the broad DeFi public with a total allocation of up to $2mln in wETH on a first-come, first-lent basis! Follow the Maven 11’s Twitter to get notified when the opportunity to deposit opens up.

And be fast, as the pool will be closed for a while after the initial launch… If you would like to learn more about being a lender on Maple Finance or preliminary information about our risk management activities, you can reach out to us directly.