Maple & Robinhood Are Bringing Billions To DeFi

**Sid Powell** (0:00)
The people who are building at the moment, and who are kind of ignoring the negative sentiment and the dissatisfaction around prices, are going to win when we have this resurgence, and hit the tipping point on the S-curve, where we go exponential.

**John Gillan** (0:18)
The entire financial world is moving on chain, but what does that mean? What does it look like? And how does on-chain finance and asset management work in actual practice? What do these terms mean? Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that some syrup goes on pancakes and some goes in your crypto wallet, but if you get the two mixed up, you're going to have a sticky situation. I'm your host, John Gillan. Today is Tuesday, July 21st, and today we are joined by Sid Powell. Sid is the co-founder and CEO of Maple Finance, founded in 2019 to bring institutional-grade credit infrastructure on-chain. With over $4.5 billion in AUM, Sid is helping to lead Maple and their syrup token to new and impressive innovations in the world of on-chain asset management. Sid is going to pour a lot of syrupy alpha on this conversation in this episode. I'm really excited for this one. So that sounds good to you. Make sure you like and subscribe, share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. Today's episode is brought to you by Securitize, the regulated rails for tokenization and Bitget Stocks 2 with real liquidity, real dividends. And without further ado, welcome back to The Milk Road Show.
Sid Powell, how are you?

**Sid Powell** (1:20)
Hey, John. I'm going well.
Glad to be here again.

**John Gillan** (1:24)
I'm glad to have you back. I think there's a lot of things to talk about today. But I wanted to start the conversation with something I think you have a front row seat to, which is this gulf between institutional bull market and adoption of crypto and digital assets and retail sentiment and bear market prices being at all time low. Can you talk about what that experience has been like from your perspective and what you're seeing happening there?

**Sid Powell** (1:46)
Yeah, sure.
It's an inverse to what we've seen in past markets where 2021, 2022 kind of felt like there was all time high euphoria, but maybe not as much in the way of traction. I think today, from my seat working in the institutional DeFi space, I think traction is actually fantastic. You can see it in some of the partnerships that have come out, whether it's Robinhood released their own program, which uses DeFi Rails on the back end, which we can talk about a little bit more soon. You've seen JP Morgan is tokenizing. Jamie Dimon was famously not the biggest fan of crypto, but here they are launching tokenized money market funds and settling things on chain. Then of course, stablecoin adoption is at an all-time high.
I think about it in terms of this paradigm of you had Carlotta Perez had famously talked about the cycle of technology revolutions, where you have an initial hype cycle and maybe the valuation of startups and capital entering the space is quite high and exceeds adoption. Then you have this crash phase, which I think we would all acknowledge we had around the end of 2022 and into 2023 Then you start to see the deployment phase. We have real adoption, so bulge bracket banks launching tokenized products, the largest asset managers in the world talking about tokenization. So it's Larry Fink at BlackRock, Apollo, and prices are lagging, that level of adoption. I would say that's where we are today. So I think from my inside seat, I think traction is very good and I think prices on the retail side will eventually come to catch up with the level of adoption that we're seeing. But there's a lot of other things taking people's attention. You've had SpaceX IPO, you have Anthropic, OpenAI, both boys to IPO and then you've had a lot of hype around semiconductors. I think that just distracts the average investor and has drawn a lot of attention away from the real fundamental progress being made in the crypto and blockchain side.

**John Gillan** (3:56)
Hi everyone, this is John. Listen, our Milk Road PRO analysts nailed this AI bull market. They had dozens of calls pay off in a big way for our community. If you want to see how our entire team of analysts are positioning for the crypto bull market that's going to come after this bear market finally ends, you can join us now at Milk Road PRO. It's just a dollar. Link is in the description. You'll get access to all of our analyst trades, their watch lists and see how they're navigating this in their portfolios and get access to ask us questions in Discord anytime, day or night. It's just a dollar. Links in the description. Milk Road PRO, join now. I'll see you there. On these fundamentals, in a market that everyone is calling a bear market, Maples loans are at an all-time high. I checked today, it's 1.75 billion in loans. Demand seems to be going up, not down. I want to know why you think this is happening in a bear market, and why is so much capital coming to Maple as opposed to one of the many other places they can go for yield on-chain? What are your thoughts on this?