Celsius Links Up With Maple Finance for Liquidity Play

Celsius, a crypto lending platform best known for paying out yield considerably higher than bank savings accounts on stablecoin deposits, announced Thursday that it is committing $30 million of wrapped ether (wETH) to Maple Finance’s liquidity pools.

• Maple Finance provides liquidity to market makers such as Wintermute and Amber.
• In turn, Celsius would be able to get exposure to the yield generated by firms like Wintermute and Amber for its vast pools of capital.
• “The interesting angle is that Celsius is using DeFi to run its lending infrastructure,” Sid Powell, Maple Finance’s CEO and co-founder, told CoinDesk. “It’s a big move forward where you have a CeFi lender acknowledging that they need to be in DeFi and turning to Maple to run their infrastructure.”
• While the pool is starting at $30 million, Powell projects that it could be worth $500 million or even $1 billion after 12 months.
• In November, Maple launched a pool in the form of a syndicated loan for Alameda Research, a trading firm, market maker and investor, which would give institutions access to Alameda’s yields in the form of a loan product.
• Maple launched the pool for Alameda in November at $25 million, but Powell told CoinDesk it has since grown to $100 million.
• Powell thinks there will be similar growth with Celsius’ pool, as they have $30 billion in assets they need to produce a yield on, he explained.
• Maple Finance’s eponymous token MPL is down 7.6% on the day, according to CoinGecko, as part of a broader market downturn due to instability caused by the war in Ukraine.

Read more: Crypto Lender Celsius Network Raises $400M in Bid to Reassure Regulators