APAC investors are bringing fresh capital to onchain asset management firms

Welcome back to Talking Tokens. We’re back at it with more content from Hong Kong Consensus. This was a good episode about asset management interest in onchain markets and where the momentum is headed. Grab your headphones and let us know your thoughts.

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The onchain asset management market is growing at a rapid pace as institutions ramp up investments in crypto and digital assets. 

Maple Finance, for one, saw its assets under management (AUM) grow 900% to more than $4 billion just in the past 12 months. And the reason for that surge was its track record in the institutional lending space over the past three years, and DeFi integrations and partnerships, Maple co-founder and CEO, Sid Powell, said on Token Relations’ Talking Tokens podcast at Hong Kong Consensus.

Most major centralized lenders like Galaxy and Nexo do not source capital from DeFi platforms. Maple has leaned into that gap, bringing on Pendle in 2024, Morpho and Euler in early 2025, and Aave a few months ago. “That’s where we’ve been able to differentiate ourselves and ultimately bring down our cost of capital which creates a virtuous cycle where we get more customers,” Powell said.

While Maple’s AUM has swollen substantially, Powell’s main focus for 2026 is scaling annual recurring revenue to $100 million from around $30 million currently. To get to that number, the company will need about $10 billion in deposits, which translates to around $20 billion in AUM, roughly 5x from where it is today. 

Ultimately, this growth can come from lending at higher rates and then borrowing at lower ones, Powell explained, adding that Maple could also borrow capital from institutions, retail investors or family offices, and pay them interest of about 5.5% via its yield-bearing stablecoins, syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT.

Powell said Maple sees a lot of  interest from high-net-worth investors in the Middle East who have emigrated from Europe, and added that the company is also doing a lot of business with funds in Asia. 

“We want to touch Bitcoin miners, and some of the digital asset treasury companies. Those are some of the conversations that we're having here in Asia,” Powell said. “I do view Asia, Hong Kong and Singapore as really big growth areas for us to tap.”

Powell isn’t the only one to harbor this idea. A number of conversations Token Relations had on the ground at Hong Kong Consensus with other major institutional players revolved around the sheer amount of capital in the region and the opportunity.

While there is momentum, the next big question is how onchain asset management can scale to hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s a question of developing products that bring traditional investor interest into crypto, making it more attractive. 

Maple is working on securitization deals, Powell says, similar to what he would do in his days working at National Australia Bank. “This would be the first securitization where you have Bitcoin-backed loans as the underlying asset.”

Maple’s view is that if it can successfully create such a debt facility, it would be able to get credit ratings agencies to label it. That would turn it into an investment-grade crypto asset that insurance companies and other traditional asset managers could invest in. “Once you can get crypto debt to investment grade, you have a very wide universe of traditional investors,” Powell explained.

“I think that's the most important thing we can do to grow the space overall. What I'd love to see is tokenized bonds and securitization facilities.”

Maple’s next step is to implement this and make a securitization deal for a few hundred million dollars. “This is a space that we think can scale to billions of dollars in the next 12 months.” 

Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.

For today’s episode, I interviewed Sid Powell, co-founder and CEO of Maple Finance, about how its onchain asset management platform grew from $500 million to over $4 billion in AUM through disciplined risk management and institutional-grade lending infrastructure.

Sid explains how Maple evolved from its original 2019 vision of tokenized bonds to becoming a direct lender serving prime brokers, asset managers, and trading firms, and why the platform pivoted multiple times to find product-market fit.

He walks through the growth of syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT as yield-bearing stablecoins, why bitcoin remains the dominant collateral for institutional lending, and how Maple is bridging crypto-native institutions with traditional finance players. The conversation covers the future of tokenized securitization, native onchain issuance vs wrapped assets, why onchain lending could scale to hundreds of billions of dollars, and Sid's advice during down markets.

Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro

01:25 – Why Sid launched Maple in 2019 and his banking background

02:44 – How Maple evolved from tokenized bonds to direct institutional lending

03:53 – Pivoting to institutional market makers during DeFi summer

05:28 – Launch of syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT as DeFi products for retail

06:41 – Traditional asset managers and banks engaging with crypto, despite long sales cycles

08:00 – How Maple manages risk and maintains 99%+ repayment rate through overcollateralization

10:08 – Why bitcoin dominates as collateral due to ETF adoption and deep derivatives markets

14:37 – Institutional demand driving Maple's growth from $500M to $4B in AUM

18:44 – Active asset management approach and institutional-grade compliance frameworks

22:18 – Future of tokenized securitization and CLO structures on blockchains

25:01 – Native onchain issuance vs wrapped tokenization and his cinema analogy

26:40 – Competing with Blackstone, and Apollo by riding the stablecoin technology wave

28:00 – Final advice: persist and build during down markets when others are leaving

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Please note this content is for informational and educational purposes only. Any views shared should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research. We may have a direct or indirect financial interest in content mentioned in this newsletter.