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Saw something cool happen yesterday. Basically, there’s an A.I. agent that’s a whitehat hacker. It find bugs and exploits in different protocols, and negotiate for a bounty. It’ll then re-distribute the bounty to the token holders.
At first I thought it was B.S., but then it actually secured a $10k bounty with $Virtual, a $2b protocol.
I’ve seen some people ignore A.I. agents because they think it’s all just bots that shitpost on Twitter. They’re evolving fast to have utility that we’ve never thought of before.
Note: Your boy is sharing a cool story – not encourage you to buy anything.
Here’s what we got today:
- The InfoFi opportunity. New points program from KaitoAI.
- Chart of the week. A new category leader for decentralized stablecoins.
- Around the web. Polygon’s new proposal for ecosystem growth, Frax Finnace’s new vision, PendleSwap launch, and more.
Today’s email is brought to you by Syrup — gateway to institutional yield.
Here’s your Edge 🗡️!
Sponsored Deep Dive
The Sweetest Yield: $SYRUP Gives Everyone Access to Institutional Yield
Key Points:
- Maple TVL grew from $72m to over $550m in just 11 months. (+763% increase)
- Despite launching in late Q2 2024, Syrup already boasts $280m in TVL
- Syrup & Maple just expanded to Base chain (powered by Layer Zero and Aerodrome)
- Syrup keeps delivering amazing APYs, netting 14.7% with over 150% collateral ratio.
- Users recently converted $MPL tokens into $SYRUP tokens. Over 80% of it is staked which shows strong community confidence.
- SyrupUSDC was recently listed in the ZeroLend RWA stablecoins market.
Why Institutional Lending is the Hidden Gem of DeFi
Institutional lending is a cornerstone of the financial world. It enables large companies to borrow capital for growth.
In TradFi, these loans are often backed by substantial collateral, ensuring security for lenders. Imagine bringing this same robust model into the transparency and efficiency of DeFi.
That’s what Maple does.
Bringing institutional lending in DeFi offers a highly secure, overcollateralized system with the transparency of on-chain assets.
Combining the reliability of TradFi with blockchain tech makes it one of the safest and most lucrative yield sources in crypto.
For years, Maple has been at the forefront of this sector. Launched in 2019, it’s the go-to platform for DeFi institutional lending, with a team of top-tier bankers and credit professionals.
In its 3+ years of existence, Maple has facilitated over $5 billion in institutional loans. Unfortunately, we normies don’t have access to the juicy institutional yield from Maple.
This was true until Syrup launched.
Syrup is Maple’s DeFi native product. It brings consistent high yield with institutional quality to everyone in DeFi. No barriers, no exclusivity. Just connect your wallet, deposit, and start earning.
Why $SYRUP Stand Out?
Maple and Syrup are united under the $SYRUP token, which governs the entire ecosystem. Maple’s lending platform generates the Yield. (We’ll get to where the yield comes from later in the article)
Here’s why it matters:
- Incentives. Earn rewards from 5M $SYRUP distributed over 90 days. (this window is still open)
- Syrup partnered with Ether.fi and Veda Labs. Ether.fi allocated 6M of their liquid stablecoin vault into Syrup.
- SyrupUSDC is available on Pendle and Zero Lend.
Regarding what defines a successful project, Syrup checks all the marks.
- They have superior tech.
- Strong team
- Lots of funding and treasury
- Ways to attract new users
All roads lead to Rome, let’s see if the numbers correspond to the expectations.
Metrics
TVL
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Current Maple TVL is around $550m, with 10x growth in 12 months. 🤯
Revenue
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According to Dune, Maple’s monthly revenue hit all-time highs this fall, with annualized earnings spiking to $3.3M.
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Net deposits quadrupled since the beginning of the year, reflecting the surge in Maple’s fees.
Numbers are good, showing the protocol is stable and profitable.
How Does Maple & Syrup Work
Maple works as a usual overcollateralized lending protocol, allowing individuals (Syrup) or institutions (Maple) to borrow and lend given certain conditions.
(KYC isn’t required to invest in SYRUP–simply connect your wallet and start earning)
Maple infra is the same for Syrup. What works for one serves another.
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Lenders deposit assets into Maple’s liquidity pools, which finance loans. In exchange, investors receive LP tokens representing their stake and earning a portion of interest.
After making a deposit, the Pool delegates (credit professionals) oversee these pools, assess borrower credibility, and manage the loan terms.
Usually, digital institutions seek capital, apply for loans, and discuss the terms with Pool Delegates off-chain.
Only after terms are agreed upon they submit a loan request on-chain.
There’s a bit more bureaucracy, but that’s key to maintaining security and credibility for Maple.
Ok, so what’s left for Lenders?
Real yield–But where does the yield come from?
I can’t explain better than @joe_defi (Maple’s co-founders & chairman):
“You have the largest counterparties in the space that are taking loans backed by digital assets, and then, the yield generated is the interest they need to repay on these loans on a recurring basis, every 30 days”.
On top of that, everything is available and transparent for checking. You’re not lending into black boxes. You can verify any information about how yields were generated.
That’s the same infrastructure you’ll get from Syrup pools.
With $SYRUP launched on November 13th, 2024 – token holders also:
- Can stake $SYRUP for extra rewards. Sustainable yield and exclusive incentives. For example, you can get 6% APY directly from Maple’s treasury.
- Become a part of DeFi’s Institutional Lender. Support the leading platform driving institutional credit within DeFi.
- Shape the future. Participate in governance by voting on decisions like staking rewards and protocol enhancements.
- Earn Yield with SyrupUSDC. On both Pendle and ZeroLend, you can park tokens there to generate yield and extra drip (Syrup incentive mechanism) rewards.
We can’t deny the value of $SYRUP. From distributing real yield generated by the protocol to voting rights, there’s a lot attached to $SYRUP.
With the KYC barrier removed, it becomes a no-brainer to bet on how powerful $SYRUP can be in the future.
One of the big issues with Maple was that their lending capacity couldn’t meet their borrowing demand. So, increasing lending capacity will lead to higher TVL & Fees.
Final Thoughts
I’m a huge fan of Maple. They’ve survived several bear markets and never stopped giving an amazing service to institutions. They’re also leaders in one of the most prominent narratives of this bull market: RWAs.
RWA is a competitive space, and the battle for attention will be tough. However, Maple is already a behemoth in the sector–originating over $5 Billion in institutional loans so far.
Maple also leads the institutional DeFi sector, always bringing the benefits of transparency and verifiability to their lending process. Don’t get PTSD from old centralized entities who used your money with leverage and blew everything up. Maple is a solid, transparent, and evergreen product.
With all that background, I firmly believe that Syrup has everything to succeed and appreciate in the long term. Syrup is already the fastest-growing DeFi protocol in 2024–it can easily lead the DeFi Renaissance narrative.
With Maple infrastructure to bridge the gap between traditional institutions and crypto, money flowing into Syrup is just a matter of time.
$SYRUP is on the path to be more than a bet–it’s a sticky path to success.
Additional Resources:
Disclaimer: This deep dive is commissioned by Maple. I researched and wrote the article, reflecting my honest opinion. This is meant to be an educational piece to bring awareness to Maple, which I’m a fan of. – Edgy
Projects
Kaito: The Biggest InfoFi Opportunity Right Now
Kaito has made a huge splash since they’ve entered the scene. Basically, they’ve been able to quantify attention aka mindshare.
Vitalik popularized the potential of InfoFi: using finance to improve our information ecology. KaitoAI is realizing this vision. It’s using points (potential tokens) to incentivize quality contributions to Crypto Twitter.
They’ve recently unleashed a new program called Yaps. Basically, it tracks the accounts with the most attention and quality discussion.
By connecting your X account to Kaito, you can start earning Yaps, which could potentially turn into tokens later. There’s the possibility that these points can turn into an airdrop one day.
I just got access this morning so I haven’t had much time to explore. But I think this is +EV even for smaller accounts.
Protocol
Ethena: The New King of Decentralized Stablecoins
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A major flippening happened this week: USDe flipped DAI.
(For the uninitiated, a “flippening” refers to one project overtaking another to become the category leader. Last cycle, people speculated about ETH flipping BTC. This cycle, we’ve seen talk of SOL flipping ETH.)
Take a look at the chart: USDe, the stablecoin issued by Ethena, now sits at a $5.7 billion market cap, surpassing $USDS (formerly DAI).
Why does it matter? $DAI (now rebranded to $USDS) has been the category leader of quasi-decentralized stablecoins for a long time.
Being a category leader has benefits. When people want decentralized stablecoin, they usually go with the category leader. Projects like Gains Network were built on top of $DAI partly because of that.
From now on, they might go with USDe.
Ethena ($ENA) launched USDe in 2024. And in less than a year, it has already become the leading semi-decentralized stablecoin. (For a deeper dive, check out our previous analysis on Ethena here.)
The massive growth was driven by the high yield given to the USDe stakers. If you have $USDe, you can now earn:
- 20%+ APR through Ethena interface.
- >80%+ APR by using auto-leverage on Contango through Morpho vaults.
With the crypto bull run just beginning, $USDe’s market cap is poised to grow more as momentum builds.
As market euphoria ramps up, comparisons to Luna—the stablecoin project from the last cycle that skyrocketed before its dramatic collapse—are inevitable.
The Bull Case: Ethena = Luna without the fraud.
- Both are decentralized stablecoin issuers.
- Both of them offer 20%+ yield on their stablecoin.
- Both are building chain ecosystems. LUNA as a Cosmos chain. ENA has expanded to several L2s. And is exploring its own ETH L2.
At its peak, the market cap of LUNA was a staggering ~$41 billion. By comparison, Ethena’s current market cap is only ~$3 billion.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed. USDe’s growth isn’t set in stone, and $ENA reaching Luna-level valuations is far from certain. However, given its fundamentals and rapid rise, $ENA currently feels undervalued.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Polygon is discussing deploying the DAI, USDC & USDT on its PoS bridge to earn yield that can be used to grow the Polygon Ecosystem.
Frax Finance shared its vision. It includes many changes like adding carry trade yield to sfrxUSD, converting FRAX to frxUSD, FXS to FRAX, and more.
Balancer shipped its v3. They’ll have hooks enabling pool customizability, 100% boosted pools, and more.
Pendle launched PendleSwap. It claims to enable multi-coin swaps with the best rates and no extra fees.
Ethena teased a partnership with BlackRock and Securitize. They’ll probably be managing funds for Ethena’s $USDtb.
🪂 Airdrop Alpha
Odos is airdropping tokens to its users. If you’ve used meta-aggregators like DefiLlama, you might have some allocation.
Derive (formerly Lyra) will airdrop 2.5% of its airdrop allocation to users who deposit at least $10k worth of weETH and trade $1 million in volume by Jan 15.
Mantis started the season 3 of their points program. They’re distributing 2M Credits daily with rewards for deposits, swaps, and cross-chain activities.
🚀 New Launches
Caldera launched Conwai. It’s an Ethereum rollup covering the full AI lifecycle, from data collection to autonomous agents.
Astrol Finance has launched on Eclipse, the SVM-based L2 on Ethereum. Astrol is the first native lending protocol on Eclipse.
🐦⬛ X Hits
- Updates on the AI Agent sector.
- What’s happening with ETH L1 scaling?
- Electric Capital released the 2024 Developer Report.
- 10 trends in crypto other than AI Agents & Memes.
- How to find AI Agent gems on Solana early?
