In my other recent longer form piece we looked at ETHFI from EtherFi. This time I wanted to take a closer look at Maple's SYRUP token.

With SYRUP there's no extra confusion around equity ownership. You have a better idea of what you hold, because it's the same thing the founders of the protocol hold. More on that later.

The thing that actually pulled me in again: Maple's AUM and loan book have been printing new all time highs while the token is sitting near May 2025 levels. So in other words, the business is better than ever and the token is down. I’ve tracked this token for a long time and that divergence was something that made me want to take a closer look.

Before we go any further, I do hold a very small SYRUP position, but it’s less than 1% of my total crypto holdings. I’m using this as my own process as to whether I should buy more.

I think the timing is good here. The founders, Sid and Joe, wrapped their Q2 ecosystem call on July 8th, so I had fresh numbers to work with. A lot of the images in this writeup come straight from that presentation.

Maple is an onchain asset manager. It takes in dollars from people who want yield, and lends those dollars to institutions who post crypto as collateral. That's the whole business. Deposits on one side, loans on the other, and Maple sits in between and takes a cut.

That cut that Maple keeps is their margin and its currently about 80bps. Borrowers pay one rate, depositors receive a lower one, Maple keeps the difference.

One piece of history worth knowing. Maple originally did unsecured lending and got burned pretty bad in 2022. Since then every loan is overcollateralized, and the book has gone through multiple market shocks with zero liquidations. The team has really gone through the worst of it and emerged stronger than ever.

In fact, their syrupUSD product has been dominating a lot of their largest onchain competitors over the last year:

The Maple team made this one simple. SYRUP is the only way to capture Maple's upside, unless you go get hired and work there yourself. To me, its highly unlikely you get Venice'd holding SYRUP.

Another thing, there’s no investor overhangs left or more supply coming online. The token supply is fully emitted and in the wild.

Here’s a quote straight from our podcast with Sid on the structure:

If you want to see the full podcast where the above quote came from it’s right here below:

I can't summarize this section any better than how Co-Founder Joe Flanagan did in his recent blog, What SYRUP Holders Actually Hold. You should just go read that. But if you don't want to, here's the TLDR:

If you’re more of a visual learner, I find these two visuals to be very helpful:

And here’s a bit more explanation of the MIP-021 Proposal as I think its important and also a bit of a novel approach:

One final thing I'll add that Joe's post doesn’t mention. In the analyst deck there is a disclaimer page saying that value accrual is not a dividend and not a legal entitlement. Basically, all of this is still at the mercy of governance. If I’m being picky, its still not quite the final form I hope we can achieve, but its miles ahead of most of DeFi. I’d even go as far to say its the best or one of the best models we have. However, maybe someday we can have true tokenized equity freely traded onchain which would be the gold standard IMO.

For this section we're leaning heavily on the reported numbers from the July 8th presentation, plus revenue data I pulled straight from the Maple Dune.

Let's start with the trailing twelve months. Maple did about $22M in revenue over the last year. Here's the monthly picture:

The revenue chart jumps out right away. Revenue climbed steadily through 2025, peaked at $2.57M in January, and has been cut almost in half since. May and June both came in around $1.2M to $1.3M, basically back to where things were a year ago.

In their presentation Maple points out the 47% YoY growth, which is very impressive. But I really wanted to hone in more on the QoQ trend here, because that is where you can start to see whether something has actually changed.

Q2 revenue came in at $4.4M, down 33% from Q1, which you can see on the slide below:

There are both bearish and bullish conclusions to draw from the numbers here. But before we go any further, we’re going to take a quick detour and add some context around the period when revenue started falling.

The stretch from October 10th through the first half of 2026 was one of the most tumultuous runs DeFi has ever gone through. The October 10th ADL massacre fried most of retail DeFi in a single day, and things didn’t really let up after that.

Many protocols were exploited, depositors pulled money from everywhere, and the entire space went into risk off mode for months. There were stretches where it felt like something new broke every few days. At one point, the narrative was honestly that AI models like Mythos might be the death of DeFi.

This was the backdrop Maple and every other DeFi protocol had to operate through.

Maple came through all of that with zero structural damage. No bad debt, no liquidation spiral, no depeg. Took margin calls through the October chaos without a single loss. More than anything, I think Maple making it through that period says a lot about both the protocol and the team behind it.

That is part of why I am not taking the revenue drop that badly. Its hard to over index on it when this was one of the worst periods of DeFi in recent memory. My personal read is that a lot of this was due to ugly DeFi conditions and that revenue bounces back.

Now one would actually assume that falling revenue means the lending business is struggling, but as we outlined at the outset, it isn't. The loan book just hit an all time high of $1.9B, up 66% in a single quarter, on a net interest margin of about 80bps. Maple grew its loans 22% in a half where the rest of DeFi lending shrank 31%. The core fundamentals of the business look to be doing great.

So if loans are ripping, what happened to revenue? Let’s get into that because it was my main question as well.