YouSaid · the spoken record

Sidney Powell

lines on the record: 53
first: 2025-06-25
most recent: 2025-06-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And so if you play stupid games, you find stupid partners. And so I've always focused on The lens of white decision would I make if I wanted to be doing this 20 years from now and then just kind of follow that. So it keeps you away from doing short-term pump and dump type stuff. Selecting for the short term over the long term.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't have the view that Maple is something we just do for a couple of years, and then you sell your tokens and you ride off into the sunset. Aside from you guys, aside from forward guidance, one of my favorite podcasts is the Founders podcast. And the guy there just instills you repetitively that most of the gains come in year 20, you're 30. You look at Jensen Huang, most of his net worth has come in years 40 plus of him being CEO of Nvidia. And so it's just like it's inculcated in my brain that most of the benefit financial, you know, the material benefit of doing this is going to come.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My thing, what's kept us in it for the long term? Obviously, we went through some pretty significant challenges at the end of 2022. We had to cut 40% of our team. Everyone who stayed had to take pay cuts. And so we had to manage morale through that and then find a new kind of core. Product to get product market fit with, which for us became over collateralized lending. But I think the biggest kind of North Star for me and for my co founder has been that we are building for the long term.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think being in crypto, there's obviously a lot of speculation. I read a lot of history, and so I liken it to other historical industries, whether it was railroads in the mid-1800s, cars and automobiles in the early 1920s, semiconductors in the 60s and 70s. And so I think any new industry that's pushing the envelope is going to attract some charlatans and snake oil salesmen. And so you just have to expect that that's going to occur. And I think too many people think, oh, the fact of their existence means that you need to shut down the industry or slow it down. I don't think that's the case. I think that's just Darwinian.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it gives them a way to differentiate themselves. And it's worth noting Saylor had a facility like this in 2022. He returned it when the banks, you know, the regional banks started collapsing in 2023 and switched to just capital markets. But I think there's a place for us to play. And I also think that a lot of these companies are going to get very competitive in trying to get a yield then on their assets. And that'll be phase two”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maple much faster than it takes to issue a new convertible node and probably less costly. Because if you think, if you're really bullish on their equity, you think their equity is the most expensive thing and that's what they're issuing a lot of. I think where we have to be careful and where they should be careful as well is you don't want to paint a target of a liquidation price for them. And so I would always say do it very conservatively, don't go take an 80% LTV loan, do it much more conservatively, but then it becomes like anything. It's a tool that you can use well or you can use poorly.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think there's obviously also what's causing the supply while people want to get rich issuing these things. I take a kind of measure, I think we try to take a balanced approach where we're working out like how do we sensibly participate. And the way that I look at it is we can complement them by being a flexible source of funding in their capital structure. Sits above the convertible bonds and above the equity But we allow them to purchase Bitcoin or ETH or Sol or Hype or XRP when they think prices are opportunistically dropping. And they use the treasury assets as collateral. And we can do it because banks will not lend to them. So we can be differentiated and we can be Complementary to them in that they can access funding from us”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's like the first one is super innovative. And then by the time you get to the 20th version, you've kind of hit farce We may not be there yet, but we're probably approaching that. And so it's an expression of the reason the mechanism for these to occur is that there is a nav premium. The reason there is a nav premium is that Bitcoin's not necessarily an investable asset in every part of the world. Maybe now in the US with the ETFs, that's far less of a problem. But in other jurisdictions where they don't yet have an ETF, you could easily make the case that this is a good retail vehicle for them”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally. As we talk a bit about institutions coming into this crypto world, one that we haven't talked about yet is treasury companies, which seem to be also all their age right now. Yeah. Everybody in their mother seems to be launching one right now. Started obviously with micro strategy and Michael Saylor. And now we just got this proliferation everywhere. So curious, yeah, what's your high level read on just that evolving industry? How does that co-integrate with the landing space and what you do at Maple?”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think structured products are going to be massive. They are already massive in private wealth spaces. You look at what JP Morgan private client practice and Morgan Stanley sell. It's a lot of structured notes. And I think if we really want to evolve the space, we're going to have to do that.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that type of product We actually got interest from parties we weren't expecting, like a corporate treasury was like, yeah, we can't really buy Bitcoin because what if it goes down? But we're all super bullish on the space in Bitcoin. So what if we buy this? And then we get the upside of Bitcoin, but it's in dollar terms and we're not taking the balance sheet risk.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We try a structured product earlier in the year. We caught Bitcoin at a bad time where it was going flat to declining, but the product was Felix, let's say you got a million dollars. If you gave it to us, we could give you a floor yield of 4%. So you're pretty competitive with T-bills. But if Bitcoin ripped, we could give you up to 33% yield on it. And we could do that by buying effectively a core spread. So we used options to get you leverage on it. And the underlying source of the yield was out over collateralized lending. So we used the yield on the loans to purchase the options. But we caught Bitcoin at a bad time. So it was going down.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A large market. Yeah, earlier in the conversation, you mentioned Athena and just the structured product of basically a funding rate packaged in what do you see in that realm in terms of what's so great about the DeFi world is it's just so stackable. You can take the Maple Yield and then add on potentially some sort of funding spread on top of that too.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nothing to call out kind of right now. And then restaking, I've seen people start to mention restaking being used as, call it, default insurance or first loss protection. So I loosely keep an eye on that. I've been talking to a few of the restaking teams around that. But they're looking for a use case. And if you look, if you think about their product was effectively repackaged catastrophe insurance, right? Like fundamentally restaking as an insurance product. And so they're looking for things to insure and credit is a large market.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so to get an insurance company in You probably have to offer something with extra risk protection. That means things like structured facilities or securitization. So we've actually got a couple of proposals in the works there, but I think that I'm really excited by that because it can bring more traditional investors in.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or, not no money down, but no servicing cost. And so if we can bring down the dollar interest cost for people posting Bitcoin, that makes us much more competitive, will help us grow. And then I'm starting to, the other thing that we're focused on is my background was securitization. So we're looking to put together more of these kind of structured facilities. Which I think will allow us and others to bring in more TradFly investors. So we saw Canter, but a lot of them are still very risk averse, even if they're overcollateralized with Bitcoin. They're kind of risk-averse.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've tried to concentrate our business around the Logic Apps. So, if you look, when we were smaller, we could do more hand-to-hand combat, and we had to look at things like DeFi tokens. Now we kind of focus on BTC, ETH, Sol, XRP, Ada, like large caps, hype increasingly But the other things that we're kind of focused on, we actually have a BTC yield product. So we use, we run a staking strategy in partnership with CoreDAO, one of the BTCL ones. I think that's really interesting and complementary to our lending business because it means that I can actually offer borrowers a low rate if I can stake their BTC. Sol, we could actually offer a soul back loans at 0% because we could stake the Sol. And so if you're looking to borrow to buy a house, think about that. You get a loan to buy a house, no money down.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most recent examples probably Morpho Labs. So they're setting up what is best described as like a central limit order book for lending. And so I'm interested to see how that turns out. They are going to have the issue of fragmented liquidity. Like how do you get an order book to sufficient scale where it's actually interesting for people to use And that's one of the reasons that we went vertically integrated. So we no longer had kind of outsourced underwriters because it's much harder to make those kind of marketplace dynamics work.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do a lot, so we do a lot open term with a 30 day recall period. So it means generally you can get your money back within 30 days, but often we have a really high velocity of deposits, so you can actually just be redeemed by new deposits coming in. Nowadays, though, as this space is getting more institutional, we're seeing the requested durations for loans stretching out. So now we've got 100 mill loan in our pipeline where the borrower wants it for 12 months. They're like, I've got to fund my business for 12 months, right? Like I need to lock in certainty. But the other thing I was going to say is you're starting to see fixed rate lending kind of happen on chain.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Without having a human involved to say we think that the fair market rate is X. And so that's why it's been really slow to develop in the more visible area of lending, which is the DeFi lending space. So Aave, Sky, Spark, Morpho. You're seeing what is worth all of our lending is actually fixed right. So when market rates change substantially, it's both a pro and a con. So, when market rates change substantially to the upside, we're slower to respond. And so we lag the market a little bit. However, when rates are declining suddenly, our rates will be slower to move than, say, an Aave or Amorpho or one of these other lending protocols. And so that means that you get a higher rate, your higher rate is stickier and it takes longer to come down. So our customers like that. And it's also more predictable for our borrowers”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can give the background for the reason it exists. And so. If you were to do fix write, you have to have at a fundamental level, you have to have somebody say, okay, I agree that this is a good rate. Like I'm willing to take this right. And that means having a human agent somewhere in the decision-making process. And so that has worked really well for CFI lending. And so most of centralized lending is actually... Probably I would say fixed rate, although if you look, some people are going sofa plus a spread, which is more conventional variable rate, but didn't work at all for DeFi protocols. If you wanted to have something algorithmic, you had to have an interest rate that moved with utilization so that you could balance demand and supply.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, 100%. So, okay, present day Maple V2 focuses a lot on fixed rate lending, which really helps for your durability. And I would love to just Unpack the dynamics between comparing and contrasting the current space in terms of the fixed rate landing space and the variable lending space and where that stands because it still seems like the variable rates landing space is still like much larger and people just seem so much more attuned to it but the fixed rate landing space is super interesting to me. And especially when you start to combine the two, I don't know if I don't even know if we're in a world right now where we have swaps, do we?”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And similar to Jeff Bezos, I think the best defense is a low cost type model. And we want to treat their margin as kind of our opportunity. And ultimately, that's the best incentive you can have to bring customers across is offer a product of comparable quality. Hopefully, better quality, but cheaper. And you really hit a home run if you can offer a better product that's cheaper. And that's one of the reasons I think stablecoins are finding such product market fit, right? Instantly settle money anywhere in the world at a fraction of the cost of sending a wire or sending something through Swift.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do. I agree with that broad thesis. I mean, the way I'm looking at it is I see a lot of organizations that are kind of slow and stilted and very bureaucratic.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think historically, it was average or 6%. Now it's closer to like 10%. And I think that's largely reflective of the fact that you've had regulatory capture, too much industry consolidation, and so you've not had, you've basically had profit taking at the expense of consumers. And so if there's one positive benefit we see over time from doing this on chain is that you see finance being a smaller percentage of the overall economy.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you just take it for granted that they're going to be there until you have some kind of spectacular tail risk event and one of them is not. That makes them in the long run kind of brittle systems. And so I think that's the opportunity for DeFi and for doing this on-chain is that you can end up with a system that is more able to withstand those kind of shocks. There is no JPMorgan who can collapse and take down the entire crypto system. It'll survive in the same way that it did after Alameter and all these other players went under in 2022. But I do think that It is really important to have that transparency and I think over time that'll be... On a historical trend, finance takes up, in my mind, too much apart of the overall GDP”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so. I mean, we had a borrower the other day. They post Bitcoin to us and borrow dollars and they said this is the address we thought the Bitcoin was being held at. Seems like the Bitcoins moved. Can you tell us where it is? And so we gave them an updated report of where their collateral is sitting. But imagine you couldn't conceive of that in traditional finance, right? Because it would just be a ledger entry where I tell, you know, I tell you, yeah, I've got your Bitcoin in an account, but I can't actually ever prove that it's there. Until I return it to you. And so in that way, most of TradFi is actually just built on layers of counterparty risk where over time the players have become such behemoths that they're single A, double A.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you have to go to for that. Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, when you look at the history of financial crises, it feels like one of the key catalysts of them to really accelerate is just counterparty risk and not knowing your counterparty is and rehypothecation of assets. And so I'm curious if you've seen any evidence in this world that we're in of just open source blockchains where you can see your loan book to your point. Do you see that as the potential for at least solving or improving that dynamic of just the fact that you know your counterparty, you know what their exposure is could just overall lessen the temperature during those heated moments?”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you look at the history of leverd returns, right, like where does private equity sit? And then the other one is hedging interest rates. You have something like Pendle where you can say, I actually just want to, I'm comfortable with this current return. I want to lock it in. And something like Pendle allows you to do that. Those are all products that... There's no specific product for that in TradFi. There's just various fragmented desks and traders that you have to go to for that.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of that just trades OTC between banks, whereas now you're able to have these products that can trade fractionally on chain. And anyway, just to keep moving in terms of the utility side of things, as an example or a bit of a case study, so we have syrup USDC. We launched that less than a year ago. It's now got over a billion in TVL, but it's permissionless, which means you can push it out into any kind of DeFi integration. So where is it used today? Secondary markets. So you can exit the position instantly. You don't have to wait to redeem. You can use it as collateral to borrow and kind of lever up your position. Now TradFi might say this is actually a horrible use case. You shouldn't be levering things.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moving beyond that, you end up with better liquidity by doing it on chain. So the fact that you can have secondary markets through things like Uniswap or other kind of swap protocols, I think is a big advantage. And the fact that your assets become kind of portable across DeFi. So I think that composability is a big sort of word that means a lot of things, but how I think about it is it encompasses things like secondary liquidity. That's really important. It's really hard in Tratfi, particularly in private credit. Private credit.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good question, and I think there's often a lot of pressure from commentators in the Tradvi space to say, you know, you have to blow them away with something that's 10 or 15x to get... To even be allowed to exist. And I don't think that's the way innovation works. But I would say stablecoins are a tremendous innovation. I don't know that I need to kind of re-litigate why they're important. But if we look at... If we look at some of the other benefits from doing this on chain, I think transparency is really paramount. So the fact that our loan book is on chain, so you can always check the performance and how many loans there are validate that they're out there.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Expect to look at BTC backed lending. Now, you know, setting up project teams and looking at the space much more seriously. So I think Overall, if we really want the space to grow, you need those institutional balance sheets to come in”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, DeFi has grown significantly in terms of market share and importance. Risk practices, I would say overall much, much safer than they were back in 2022. So not just because under collateralized lending is much, much less, but the collateral now that you see tends to be posted in triparty accounts. So you have much more involvement from kind of solid enterprise-grade custody solutions. So size is different, smaller, composition, much more DeFi weighted, and then risk management is definitely much more evolved than it was before. The other thing that's coming in now that is, I think, a very positive catalyst for the space is more institutional participation. So we announced a few weeks back a deal with Cantor. So this is obviously a very well-established TradFi name who's lending against Bitcoin. And we've seen appetite from names you would never”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's focus on a few different aspects. So, in terms of size, as I mentioned before, we're actually much smaller than maple is much larger than we were previously, but the lending space is much smaller than it was previously. So you've seen a contraction in the CFI lenders. Now, the CFI lending side is actually dominated by Tether. So, size is much smaller, composition In loans outstanding nowadays, probably 15 total, so down by a factor of 75%. And DeFi lending is much, much larger than it was in 2022. So you can see that people's risk appetite and also where retail capital could go has totally shifted. Retail capital can now only go to DeFi. Because folks like Celsius, Blockfi, they're not around.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now we're in this world of over collateralized lending. We got Fed funds that gives us a durable yield on T bills and some other interesting structured products around that as well. So we'd love to just have you just paint the picture on where the industry is at today in terms of just like digital asset crypto lending.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a come to Jesus moment where we were looking at things like tokenized T-bills. And obviously Ondo got very early to that space. But then there were a series of fast followers and we tried a product like that for a while, but we couldn't differentiate ourselves. So there's 15 competitors. Nobody makes any money on that product at the moment. Everybody's waving their fees. There's no revenues on it. And so we were like, we've got to get out of this product. It's a red ocean. We've got to get somewhere where people are not competing.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, yeah, if we'd had to purely compete in an algorithmic way, it would be very tough to come in and compete with an Aave or Morpho or a Spark. But by being differentiated, we actually get the opportunity nowadays to partner with all of them. Serap USDC, so our yield-bearing dollar product is integrated on Morpho. There's been a temperature check on Aave. And then Spark has also integrated us. So by being different, we're actually able to complement them rather than being a kind of pure competitor with them. But I would say what we've tried to do overall is our North Star has been like, how do we serve kind of institutional clients and what does the product need to look like to make it attractive to them? And then the other thing is just where can we be differentiated? 2023, we had this.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you look at who we view our natural competitors as being in the traditional finance space, the major ones I would point to are probably Ares and Apollo. So these are asset managers who focus on credit, and that's kind of where we want to guide Alpac.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think there's a set of institutional clients who don't want to deal with something that's entirely algorithmic and permissionless. And that's expressed in different ways. One of the ways it's expressed is that a lot of these larger institutions hold native Bitcoin and they are not willing to wrap that Bitcoin because they think it's a taxable event. And so that automatically rules them out of using things like Aave and Morfo. And so we've tried to kind of go where we think the competition is weaker and where we can be differentiated.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so where we are today nowadays we focus more on over collateralized lending because all of the, similar to like why do we go into undercollateralized lending to start with, very competitive and then post 2022, very uncompetitive. There was a total lack of supply there and so we just stepped in and kind of filled that.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually went under. But I think the discipline was instilled by the fact that it was under collateralized lending, so you had to pay more attention to the balance sheet.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we saw these tokens on there that were marked on there at a few hundred million. Their value, like just the amount that Alameda held. And if you've never heard of it, how can it be like a multi-billion dollar token? And so the underwriters on our platform stress those to zero and then also gave no credit for FTT. I can't issue Cidcoin and then count that as equity on my balance sheet. That's crazy. But that was what they were doing. So it looked like they had a $14 billion balance sheet with eight plus inequity. But if you subtracted FTT from there, it was like a billion on equity carrying more than $10 billion in debt. And so the underwriters on the platform wound up the loans to them four or five months before they eventually”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the fact that we were doing under collateralized lending on the platform meant that you had to go and look at the borrower's balance sheet. And that was what allowed us in the underwriters on our platform to decline 3AC. They produced financials a couple of times that didn't add up. And then they also had a massive red flag, which is when the entity structure abruptly changes. So people who were the owners before are now replaced by the wives of those people. That's usually a red flag coming from a banking background. And then with Alameda, we saw the same balance sheet that everybody else saw.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think there are a few things at play in how we survive that. So there's, and to put in context, so I think across the Maple platform, over all of 2022, there were two borrowers who defaulted. And we managed to miss Alameda and 3AC. So we dodged some of the landmines there. But also we were run as this kind of platform model where you had the credit managers making the decisions. And so I think one of the structural reasons that we survived is that You had segregated pools where a default in one would not commingle or trigger a default in the other pool. So that helps. That was a structural element that we've tried to carry forward into what we do today. And then the other element was to a certain extent the manual underwriting helped us.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nowadays, I would say it's much more of a sustainable form of yield. And that's probably why the overall borrowing appetite is still much lower than it was in 2022, is there's just not as much sustainable yield to support paying interest on loans.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the case of our business, so the yield that maple was producing, it was Arbitrage profits and market making deal profits from market makers. So if you look the major clients that we had were larger market maker firms like Wintermute, we also had some hedge funds on there, but effectively they were trading volatility and doing market making deals and also a lot of them were running the basis. Remember, the basis hadn't been tokenized yet, so it's a couple of years before Athena. And so you had entire hedge funds that were set up just to do the basis because it was inaccessible for traditional finance. And so a lot of people were just doing that. As well. So, those were like the major yield sources for us. And then for other players, there was a combination as well of things like, you know,”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the height of 2022, there's probably 55 billion in loans outstanding. Now I would say we're still less than 20 billion.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But a lot of what allowed that to happen, the significant amounts of leverage, where one, you had those kind of retail deposit takers, so they could aggregate capital and lend it out the same way the banking system does. And two, you had a flood of VC capital into the space. So at one point, Celsius had raised 700 million, right? So that capital has to go into something. It went into the lending book, it went into some of the other products they were doing. But it was the combination of the macro factors, the super high risk appetite. And then also the lack of prior major credit events. So people weren't stung by that. And it took us a couple of years as a space to really recover from that. If you look today, there's really still very little leverage in.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because T-bill writes, people forget what an impact interest rates have on the crypto space, because T-bill rates were basically zero at the time. Any yield was good yield. And so you came in, you were doing under collateralized lending, you're getting anywhere from 10 to 15% initially, and then later 6%, 7%, 8%. But people were super hungry for yield and they had a very high risk appetite. So the combination of those things allowed under collateralized lending to really flourish. And I think what happened is obviously you had kind of some lax credit practices and you had a couple of event-driven triggers that caused a deleveraging. So you had Terra Luna, 3ac, Celsius.”
2025-06-25 · Forward Guidance · DeFi Lending Will Eat Wall Street By 2030 | Sidney Powell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT