Credit, properly understood, is a memory of promises. Who owes what, which lender gets paid first, what can be sold when the borrower falters. Sid Powell spent his early career learning that memory's grammar in Australian institutional banking. Then he tried to move it onto a ledger that never sleeps.
The result was Maple, the company Powell started with Joe Flanagan in 2019 and launched in 2021. Its first idea sounded almost too neat: professional credit managers could run lending pools on public blockchains, borrowers could reach capital more efficiently, and lenders could see far more of the machinery. Powell offered a useful comparison. Maple would provide “tooling to run a lending business that just happens to be on chain,” rather as Shopify gives merchants the machinery to run a store.
The analogy did something crypto language often refuses to do: it made the product comprehensible. Maple was not asking a public ledger to become an experienced loan officer. It was asking software to make the loan officer's work faster, more visible and easier to distribute. Underwriting still mattered. So did judgment. The blockchain would improve the rails, not repeal the borrower.
An apprenticeship in the machinery
Powell arrived at the idea through the unfashionable end of finance. He studied finance and law at the University of Adelaide, with international-finance coursework at HEC Montréal. At National Australia Bank he moved through credit risk, securitisation and corporate finance. A published conference biography credits him with participating in more than $3 billion of corporate-bond issuance. He later crossed from adviser to client, joining commercial-lending fintech Angle Finance as Treasurer and Portfolio Manager and running a bond-funding program of more than $200 million.
That move mattered. At the bank, Powell had watched entrepreneurial lending companies seek funding so they could lend more to their own customers. He found himself increasingly interested in the builders across the table. At the fintech, he had to manage the capital himself. Maple joined the two views: the institution arranging money and the operator who needs it to arrive.
He and Flanagan began in April 2019, working nights and weekends while Powell still had a finance job. In 2020, during the pandemic, an initial raise of roughly $1.3 million allowed him to go full time. The product launched the following April. The timing placed Maple inside a market in a great hurry to lend.
Pancakes explain the name. Defaults explain the business.
Maple's name contains a small joke from Powell's old world. Debt arrives in layers: senior claims are paid before junior claims, followed by the equity tranche. Picture those layers as pancakes. Now picture the cash-flow waterfall - the order in which money runs through them - as syrup. Powell also wanted a name people could spell and remember, a modest ambition with uncommon value in financial technology.
The original business grew quickly. But 2022 made the distinction between a visible system and a safe one painfully clear. The failures of Terra, Celsius and FTX spread through crypto credit. Orthogonal Trading defaulted on $36 million of loans issued through Maple pools after funds became trapped on FTX. The default represented roughly 30 percent of active loans across the protocol at the time. Maple severed ties with Orthogonal, and Powell said he was shocked and disappointed. Investors in the affected pools bore losses.
There was a structural consolation: each pool sat in a separate smart contract, so losses were contained rather than mixed across the whole platform. There was also a larger rebuke. Maple had enabled undercollateralized lending to trading firms in an industry where balance sheets could be opaque and relationships unexpectedly circular. One borrower had reportedly understated its FTX exposure before defaulting. Software had made the market legible in some ways while crucial facts remained concealed offchain.
Figures describe different moments and measures. Deposits and AUM are not interchangeable; the sequence shows the scale of Maple's contraction and later rebuild.
Maple's deposits, once above $900 million, fell to roughly $25 million. “People were saying, ‘Lending is dead. It has no place in crypto,’” Powell later recalled. It is the sort of sentence that can become either an epitaph or a product brief.
The pivot was written in collateral
Powell and his team kept the central thesis - capital markets could benefit from onchain settlement, automation and transparency - while changing the kind of credit Maple emphasized. By late 2023, the company was concentrating on secured, overcollateralized institutional loans. Bitcoin and other liquid digital assets would back borrowing. Loan-to-value thresholds, margin calls and liquidation levels moved to the center of the operating model.
The process Powell describes is part banker, part control room. Borrowers pass identity checks, supply financial information and explain how they will use the money. Maple assesses their balance sheets and the liquidity and volatility of proposed collateral. Custodians hold the assets. Price feeds and a continuously staffed monitoring process watch the loans. When collateral touches a margin-call threshold, a borrower is automatically notified and given time to top up. At the liquidation level, the collateral can be sold.
During a sharp market selloff in August 2024, Maple reported issuing more than 25 margin calls and receiving $23 million in collateral. The average resolution time was 3.2 hours, and the company said lender principal was protected during that episode. A ledger that stays awake is useful. A team prepared to answer its alarm is more useful.
The change also altered Maple's identity. Its institutional product offered curated credit opportunities, while Syrup made yield from Maple's loan strategies available more broadly in DeFi. Powell increasingly described the company as an onchain asset manager rather than merely a lending protocol. The language widened while the lending strategy narrowed.
Powell and Joe Flanagan begin Maple as a nights-and-weekends project.
The onchain lending product launches in April.
Crypto's credit crisis and the Orthogonal default break the first model open.
Maple concentrates on secured, overcollateralized lending and launches new pools.
The company reports $4.55 billion in AUM and a $1.9 billion first-half loan book.
Focus as a form of solvency
Powell's public manner is heavy on mechanisms. He discusses collateral quality, monitoring systems and market structure more readily than destiny. When asked about Maple's strategy in 2025, he invoked Steve Jobs's pride in the things Apple declined to do. “It's always difficult in a startup,” Powell said. “You have a temptation to do too many different things.”
For a credit company, focus is more than a tidy roadmap. Every added market, asset and borrower type creates another place for correlations to hide. Maple's post-crisis strategy became a refusal to confuse activity with safety. It sought large institutional borrowers, liquid collateral and lending terms the operations team could monitor around the clock.
The reported numbers returned. In 2024, Maple said total value locked rose from $85 million to a peak above $600 million, while new institutional originations reached $2.3 billion. By the end of 2025, the company said TVL had passed $4.5 billion. Its August 2026 update reported $4.55 billion in assets under management, $6.4 billion in originations during the first half and $12.2 million in first-half revenue. These are company figures, and credit deserves suspicion precisely when the chart looks pleasant. What matters for Powell's story is how explicitly the comeback was attached to a different risk posture.
A future that looks oddly familiar
Powell's ambition has grown past recreating a crypto loan desk. He expects the border between traditional finance and DeFi to blur as stablecoins, tokenized assets and public ledgers become ordinary financial infrastructure. Maple's stated goal is to become a standard-bearer for onchain asset management, with transparency, automation and global access. It has also published a target of $100 billion in originations by 2030.
The irony is pleasing. Crypto spent years promising to replace finance, while Powell's project has become more credible by respecting finance's oldest concerns: collateral, seniority, custody, disclosure and the unromantic fact that borrowers sometimes fail. The novelty sits in the rails. The caution is ancient.
This is where the pancake story earns a second meaning. Layers matter. Waterfalls matter. The order of claims remains important whether the ledger lives in a bank's database or across a blockchain. Maple's first chapter treated old financial machinery as something software could streamline. Its second chapter learned which parts could not be wished away.
Powell did not emerge from 2022 with a cleaner myth. He emerged with a more specific company. That is the rarer founder trick. Markets are brutal editors, and they do not accept tracked changes. They simply delete the weak sentence. Maple survived long enough to write another one.