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Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Before we get started, a quick reminder. Nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only and my guest and I may hold assets discussed in the show. For more disclosures, visit unchained crypto.com introducing
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Today's livestream features two guests in the on chain lending world. In the second half, we'll hear from Paul Frambeau of Morpho. But first up, we have an interview with Sid Powell, CEO and co founder of Maple Finance. Welcome, Sid.
C
Hey, Laura. Thanks for having me on. Glad to be here.
A
Yeah, excited to chat with you. So there's a number of defi lending protocols. Maple Finance is one of them. So just tell us what niche it occupies in this world.
C
Yeah, in the defi lending space, Maple kind of crosses two interesting unique segments. So we do primarily institutional lending. So Maple does not lend to retail users. Our counterparties or our clients who borrow from us typically include asset managers, trading firms, exchanges, family offices, other investment management firms. The other thing that's unique about Maple is that we are almost a hybrid. So we source capital on chain. We, we have syrup usdc, Syrup usdt, which folks can deposit to through smart contracts. However, when we do loans with our institutional borrowers, we sign off chain legal agreements with them and then we can also accept collateral into qualified custodians. So in this way, we're a little bit of a hybrid between CEFI lending, which would use off chain agreements and custodians, and defi lending, where you take in the capital on chain and you record all of the loans on chain.
A
Okay. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's this interesting hybrid. So describe a little bit more about the borrowers and lenders that use Maple.
C
Yeah, it's a great question. So if you, if you look, who would come and use Maple typically, typically our clients, as I mentioned at the start, are going to include prime brokers. So folks who provide margin or lending or over the counter settlement to trading firms. It also includes asset managers who might be running yield strategies on chain, for example, or they might be running liquid token strategies. And then we have family offices who might hold, hold a significant amount of Crypto, but they want to take out a loan to purchase real estate or make some other kind of investment. So the loan sizes that we do are typically anywhere from the smallest loan we do would be about $10 million. And the largest we did was actually just before Christmas was a $500 million one. In each case our clients will post Bitcoin or Ether, Solana or xrp, but some large capitalization crypto which serves as collateral for us and helps ensure that if they can't make their repayments that we still have protection so that our us and our users are not going to take on, you know, take on any credit losses.
A
Okay. And then you also mentioned another key component of the Maple system, which is your stablecoin, which there's a USDC and USDT version. Explain a little bit more about how that is used.
D
Yeah.
C
Now this is interesting. So you've seen over 2025, Laura, we had a ton of new stable coins emerge. A lot of them purporting to use different trading strategies or arbitrage to generate their yield. What we decided to do was not necessarily to build a stablecoin. We have built a, call it a yield product or a savings product on top of two existing stablecoins. So on top of USDC and usdt, the yield in Maple's instance comes from the over collateralized loans to these institutional borrowers. So we originate a loan to them, they pay interest that then gets passed through as yield to holders of syrup USDC and Syrup usdt. So we launched both of these over a year ago. Since then they've grown, they've been the fastest growing products that we have and they drove a lot of Maple's growth over 2025. And a lot of that I think has come from the composability. So when you have syrup USDC or syrup usdt, you can use it as collateral in AAVE or Morpho or Euler, you can put it into Pendle and hedge the price or rather hedge the interest rates or you can use it cross chain on Solana or Arbitrum or most recently base. So I think that defi composability has been another unique point where Maple kind of is different to other CEFI lenders. And, and that drove a lot of our growth that we saw in 2025.
A
Yeah, you briefly mentioned AAVE, I saw that. You know, you are now an issuer in AAVE in a partnership that began in October, I think, and now you're the fastest growing issuer in aave. So explain a little Bit more about that partnership is is that the Syrup USD C or usdt?
C
Yes, it's funny. Funny enough, it's actually both. So we entered into a partnership with AAVE late last year in end of Q3, early Q4. And the way the partnership works is that Syrup USDC and Syrup USDT have been onboarded as collateral. So effectively the proposition to a user is you can put USDC into Syrup usdc, mint it and then it's earning you. At the moment it was moment it's closer to 5%, but in the past it's been up around 6 or 7%. And either way, the important point is that you can earn a higher yield than you can than the cost of borrowing on aave. So it makes sense to post it as collateral to aave, borrow against it, mint more Syrup USDC or usdt and then post it again to aave. So you're performing the looping trade. That's why the yield outperformance is the reason that it's grown so fast. And our partnership with AAVE has actually taken place across multiple chains. So initially we did platform plasma with them and then we've since taken that partnership to Arbitrum to base and, and we're looking at other chains at the moment. But you know, it's been a really good partnership for us, really good partnership for them. For AAVE users, what it means is that it brings up the utilization. So people might have said, well, aren't you a competitor with aave? And the answer is no. We actually work quite well as partners because having CERT USDC on there increases the utilization and the yield available for AAVE users.
A
Yeah. And I also saw yesterday Athena published a proposal to use Maple and Anchorage as potential direct lending partners for the backing assets of usde. Explain how that would work and how that proposal came about.
C
So we've, you know, we have a great relationship with Athena. I've known Guy for a number of years. And the way that that proposal would work is that Athena would use Syrup USDC or Syrup USCT or our permissioned Maple institutional pool as a source of yield. So they would deploy some of their, some of their assets that are backing USDE to it and then it provides a yield and then the yield can serve or the yield can be passed on to their SUSD holders. So it's a partnership for them that represents diversification of their asset backing and their sources of yield. It gives them access to a non correlated source of yield. So lending rates are different to the basis trade. So it's a diversification of their strategies. And for us it's a great partnership. Athena is a blue chip within the space. We would love to work with them and ultimately we want to fulfill this niche of being an institutional lender and providing curated yield opportunities to partners with, whether they are family offices or asset managers or blue chip defi protocols like Athena.
A
Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about the work that you do with institutions. Last year we saw that Kanter launched a bitcoin lending facility that uses Maple or Maple, sorry was one of the first to tap its credit facility. You also have a partnership with Bitwise. This also happened last year and that's for their institutional clients to gain access to on chain investment opportunities. Tell us how those arrangements have been going, especially in what is kind of an interesting time in the market. You know, I don't know how that's affected like institutional interest in these types of products.
C
I think it's. Yeah, it's definitely one of the, one of the surprising things has been the resilience of the institutional interest in crypto, I would say over you know, periods of kind of price weakness, for lack of a better word. Now the Cantor relationship, you know, began a while back. We, we were onboarded as their first, you know, their first bitcoin backed borrower. So the way the relationship worked was Maple posted bitcoin to borrow dollars from Cantor and you know, and then they have since brought on other institutional borrowers like Falcon X. But for us this was a huge watershed moment because obviously Cantor has an incredible brand and presence and history within traditional finance. And I think it really signaled the maturity of the space that a storied Wall street player like Canter was willing to come in and do bitcoin back lending. And I think it signifies that you should expect to see more put private credit players or investment banks start to move into this space over time and that it's an investable asset class. You know, the, the credit risk is good enough, the yield is good enough for institutions to want to earn yield from bitcoin backed lending. Bitwise similar, similar case, although they are more of an asset manager and so they were allocating from one of their funds. They liked the yields that were available on chain and they liked the transparency, the liquidity available from deploying into yield opportunities on chain. Where I've seen institutional interest evolve over the past 12 months, you know, bitcoin has, has been down or trading sideways. Altcoins have been trading down. But what we've seen is that the Key difference this time versus 2022 is that there is no case of fraud or there's been nothing that's really dented the trust of institutions in the space. And so, you know, I was at Consensus Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago and what I saw was continued interest from a lot of community banks, credit funds, other asset managers in exploring partnerships with players like us and like other crypto lending firms in the space. And I don't expect that trend to slow down anytime soon.
A
Yeah, it's interesting that you brought up the comparison to 2022 because I just realized that, you know, what we in the crypto world talked about so much that year was about how defi kind of worked as expected. The software did liquidations in an early fashion. You didn't have that problem that you had with the CEFI lenders where they were either double posting collateral or they were lying to people anyway. So it's just so interesting that then now we have this trend where institutions are getting more involved and what they're doing is they are using these on chain protocols, the software and yeah, I think it sort of shows how much trust they have in that system. But I wanted to ask a little bit more about the institutional view on the crypto markets because, because obviously we're quite well aware that retail sentiment right now is a little bit, maybe more on the pessimistic side. So you know, I wondered if, yeah, you could talk a little bit about where you think on chain institutional activity will go this year based on, you know, what you're hearing that they're interested about and things like that.
C
Yeah, no, I think great question. A few recent things I've kind of signpost in the way of institutional activities. So a few weeks back Leden was able to successfully securitize some bitcoin backed loans. They were able to get a rating on that deal from S and P and it was arranged by Jeffers. So you know, very large, well respected traditional investment bank. Last week we also saw Kraken and Nasdaq announced there was going to be 24,7 trading of tokenized equities. And then the other point I would mention is, you know this is going back further a few months but you saw that JP Morgan also indicated they might look at lending against bitcoin collateral. So it's a. See that's three important sectors. So investment banks, commercial banks and equities exchanges. And so I think this highlights three of the key trends. So we're obviously biased towards the crypto lending space. But in Our view, there are real businesses there that produce revenues in crypto backed lending. And there's currently over 50 million Americans who hold crypto of some kind. We think that share is going to grow over time and so there's going to be more of a need to lend against Bitcoin or provide credit against Bitcoin over time. So I expect that trend to continue and I expect private credit firms and banks to start to get involved. The other element is crypto has highlighted the need or rather the consumer appetite for 24. 7 trading. And so I think you're going to see more assets tokenized so that they can trade 24. 7. That's really being driven by crypto and meme coins and prediction markets. So starting to encroach on what used to be the territory of traditional exchanges. And then the other thing is I expect you to continue to see tokenization of funds and other assets over time. So these are three of the big trends that we're seeing this year. How I think you need to position yourself is being able to work with traditional players to partner with them on say accepting their tokenized funds as collateral or sourcing funding or structuring facilities where you can access traditional capital. That's one of the things that Maple is focused on for 2026.
A
Okay, yeah. And just explain a little bit more about that because we saw this news about NASDAQ and Kraken. I don't know if you saw. Vlad Tenev of Robinhood was quoted. I didn't catch the exact quote, but it was something like tokenization is going to eat everything essentially. So how do you think that will interse a little bit with the on chain lending world?
C
Yeah, it's a great question. And so I have heard that Vlad speak before on, you know, tokenization kind of eating everything. And, and then of course with, with the recent Kraken announcement. I have heard the NASDAQ CEO talk about it as well. But the way that it intersects crypto lending is right now the limits to the growth of our business, whether it's Maple or Morpho or AAVE or Euler is stablecoin inventory that you can lend out. So we need more stable coins. So the genius act has been very positive. And then the other, the other point is collateral. So the primary collateral that we will lend against at the moment is large cap crypto, whether it's Bitcoin, Eth, Solana, xrp, the more credible financial assets that get tokenized, whether these, whether it's the S and P index or Nvidia or Microsoft or the Mag 7, the more collateral there is to lend. So you have a flywheel there where as more assets get tokenized, you can do more lending against it and therefore it becomes more useful to tokenize more assets. And that flywheel will generate a feedback loop that attracts more and more people into tokenizing their assets. Wall street asset managers, whether they be Apollo or blackrock or Hamilton Lane, look at tokenization as a way of getting new distribution, a way of growing their assets under management. And that's why they've been so attracted to and enticed by the trend as well. So in my view it creates a feedback loop. But the part that we at Maple would play is we would be happy to lend against these tokenized, tokenized assets, whether they be equities or funds or something else.
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean just hearing you talk, it's so clear. You know, everybody's talking about how crypto and tradfire are going to converge. But you know, once you hear, you know, just that simple unlock like tokenizing stocks, like it, like, then you start to see kind of the money Legos piece come together and it's not just crypto, but you know, all, all forms of finance. So I wanted to ask you a slightly technical question. I noticed you're on Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum Base, Mantle Inc. There's probably a few others that I missed. And we're in this position now where Ethereum is now going to be focusing on scaling the L1 rather than following an L2 centric roadmap. And obviously I saw, so last year you deployed on Solana and just generally there's a lot of options now about where to deploy. So how do you think about that decision? And, and I'm also curious like if you have any thoughts on the strengths or weaknesses of the on chain institutional market, both on Ethereum and Solana.
C
Yeah, it's a great question. And, and there's a lot to want, There's a, there is a lot to unpack. I'm not technical so I will do my best to kind of simplify for the, for the audience. But effectively Maple deployed our, our key contracts. So where we originate loans to institutional borrowers takes place on Ethereum and then, but this limited our reach. So last year as we looked to other ecosystems that we wanted to be part of and, and participate in, in their growth with, alongside them, we looked first at Solana and how we approached it is more of a hub and spoke model. So customers currently for Maple Ethereum remains the Hub, this is where we do loans to our institutional borrowers and it's where the smart contracts primarily sit. And then you have the spokes which are our presence on other chains. So Maple partnered with Chainlink and used CCIP to bring Syrup USDC and Syrup USDT to other chains. So Syrup USDC is on Solana and this was our first big cross chain push. And what we had to do is we had to look at why hadn't yield products worked on, you know, when they'd been bridged across to Solana in the past. And what we found was they weren't integrated with the ecosystem there. So how we've approached cross chain has been Maple tries to partner with the lending protocols and the money markets on other chains so that Syrup USDC or Syrup USDT can be held as collateral and looped and bring yield to those ecosystems. It then means that it makes it more useful having stablecoins on those ecosystems as a holder. So the ecosystem likes it, the other DEFI protocols like it, and they don't view us as much as competition, but instead a partner who can help them grow. So as we look at other chains, our key focus has always been we're kind of chain agnostic. Like we would like to be on as many chains as possible, but the way that we make decisions is kind of first and foremost commercial. How many stablecoins are on that chain and therefore how many potential customers do we have if we go to that chain? It's no good going to a technically brilliant chain that has little to no stable coins on there because there just won't be any customers for us. So that's sort of how we look at it. As I look at institutional adoption, I think the liquidity and the liquidity and the supply of stablecoins on Ethereum really is a very material lead, an advantage for it as an ecosystem. And the way I've heard it expressed before is that Ethereum is kind of evolving as the debt capital market of on chain and of the on chain ecosystems. And Solana was kind of positioning itself as almost the sort of the equity capital market. I think the two will converge over time because I've seen, you know, I have seen significant debt transactions take place on Solana, but I would say that in tech you tend to follow kind of power law, distribution. And so Ethereum does very much at this point kind of remain the hub. And you can see it expressed in being the first chain that a lot of these tokenized funds are getting launched on. And indeed in the fact that Maple, aave, Athena, three very big yield sources of yield for people. Still, most of the activity takes place on Ethereum.
A
Okay, that's super interesting. I did also want to ask about another big trend that we're seeing, which is that daos are having some challenges. There were a number of Daos in 2025 that disbanded or paused. And obviously AAVE is experiencing these tensions between the Labs entity and the dao. I mean, it looks like it's resolved, but in a way where, yeah, there's sort of a split happening. And you might have seen in Stani' little essay on X, he kind of talked about how having a DAO have kind of so much say over a protocol just meant that there were challenges that it had in, you know, trying to be nimble and, you know, kind of like responding to the market. And so a little bit more centralization is, in a way, a competitive. Competitive advantage. But I was interested to, you know, hear you talk about how you think about that because, you know, obviously I. I see Maple governance token and you have a dao, so. Yeah, talk about how you think about that conundrum.
C
Yeah, it's an interesting one. I've. I've sort of. I've watched the. The AAVE matter play out, and I'm, you know, I'm sympathetic to. To both sides of the argument. We, you know, we work with. With both teams, and we have a great relationship with the AAVE ecosystem. It was hard, like, navigating the. Navigating the Dow conundrum. A lot of the issues stem from really, the regulatory enforcement environment of 2020-2024 under chair Gensler, where there was an emphasis that you had to be decentralized as aggressively as possible. And this meant naturally, you had to then separate the Labs entity, because you have to employ people to kind of work on your protocol. From a dao or governance entity, which functions like a Treasury, governs all of the code needs to have decentralized, credible representation by token holders, and that it then created issues like, you know, should every budget decision need to be approved by the public at large who hold the token? And does that prevent you from moving nimbly or fast or taking. Taking risky bets when it comes to the direction that you want to take the protocol in the way that we al. Also, one other point to make is should you raise. Should you raise capital by selling equity in the Labs entity, or should you only ever sell tokens in the dao? The way that we approach the problem, because we. We encountered similar issues, but fortunately or unfortunately, we were much smaller than AAVE, so. So over the course of, you know, 2020 to 2024, you know, there wasn't as much, you know, there wasn't as much public dao interest in us. But what we did is at Maple, we've, we've always determined that you should just have one governance token that, that manages everything. And so we never raised equity into a conventional LLC entity from, from venture capitalists. Instead, everyone has just participated by holding or purchasing the token. So we kept a single capital structure and I would encourage new startups to kind of go in that direction. I think you can choose equity or a token, but you can't have both because you end up with conflicting priorities. Who owns the revenues, who owns the assets? The other element is we've had consistent governance participation where anyone who holds the token can vote on the governance forum. But we've tried to delegate enough responsibility to us as a core team like the Labs company, so that we can make efficient management decisions and move fast and, you know, and make strategic decisions for the benefit of the protocol, rather than having to put every decision up for a committee. So I think there is a balance between agency and management and ownership, and you have to strike that. It's just, the answer is it's just very difficult to do that for daos, and that's why a number of them have, you know, experience the issues that they have.
A
Yeah, that bit about where you talked about how there's like a conflict of interest with the token and the equity, you know, just reminds me of what happened with the Circle Axelar thing. And, you know, definitely the token holders really, I think, felt burned basically by what happened there.
C
So we, we put all of our IP into a Guernsey trust and then the Cayman foundation is the beneficiary of that trust. So hopefully we've, we've kind of done enough work to, to ensure that an axel are like, situation can't, can't happen to the Maple ecosystem.
A
And then. But what about that bit about what Stani said about how he felt like when you have a dao involved in governance, then it kind of makes it harder for you to kind of respond in a nimble fashion, you know, the way that like a business would, you know, being more centralized. So how do you, yeah. Manage that?
C
I agree with that. I think ideally the, the balance you strike early on is you set out, here's the decisions the business is going to be responsible for and have delegated authority for and it's accountable for these decisions. And then here's what they need to escalate to the Dow. And I think if you strike that balance early on, it's, it's possible to manage. But I do sympathize with that. Like, should the Dow, should the Dow review everyone's salaries and set, you know, at the moment we put up a quarterly budget and we seek approval from the Dow to, you know, effectively to finance budgetary expenses for the next quarter. However, if you had the Dow having, if you needed to show you'd hit milestones before the Dow approves your budget to pay salaries for software developers, it becomes harder to attract talent because you can't provide surety for their employment. What if you don't get your next budget approved? And also if you open it up to kind of everyone to question, maybe, maybe question is the wrong word. But if you have to then kind of justify your entire strategic plan for the next year to everybody who's in the dao, some who may be less across things than others, then I think it's naturally going to force you to move slower. I think the correct. An analogy might be imagine if Steve Jobs had had to go and get approval from an entire committee of hundreds of thousands, or maybe not thousands of people, but hundreds of people for every product decision he wanted to make ahead of time. You might risk never having had bets like the iPhone. Certainly you couldn't have released a finished product because it would have been leaked, like way ahead of time. Perhaps not the best analogy, but that's the way I think about it. And so I am very sympathetic to the argument that you do need some latitude and discretion in management.
A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, the other kind of hot topic that I wanted to ask you about was AI. I'm sure you're seeing just how quickly AI is being integrated into crypto. And I wondered how you're thinking about how to protect either against potential hacks or how to take advantage of AI for Maple.
C
Yeah, AI. AI has definitely been a super hot topic this year and, you know, and with fantastic reason behind it. So I think we're kind of thinking about AI in sort of three stages. So I think right now, you know, right now you use, our engineering team uses it, we, our originations team uses it for screening new collateral or for letting us know if the, if the portfolio is at risk. So if you're hitting, if you're heading into a volatile trading period and you need to make sure that you have everyone on deck. So every day I get an AI digest of here's all of Maple's loans Here's the collateral we have against all of them. Here's the volatility, the collateral, and is it increasing or decreasing? So that's kind of like stage one. That's, you know, very, very low lift. Stage two for us would be can we engage with customers using AI? Could we send, could we have an AI bot that detects if a position is approaching margin call and sends them an automatic notification, lets them know the address to send the bitcoin to and helps them troubleshoot the process? That's stage two and I think that's coming over the next 12 months. Stage three, which we're nowhere near yet, would be we have a senior underwriter on the Maple team and then they have a dozen agents underneath them who go out and do everything from negotiating new loan terms to helping to settle the loan to servicing the loans, collecting interest payments and managing any margin calls or liquidations. That's stage three. But that is, I do think we're going to get there and it's going to, it's going to one benefit customers because you can charge less interest or tighter margins, so less cost for them, faster onboarding for everyone. So we will be able to underwrite decision loans much, much faster. And then for anyone in the, in the Maple ecosystem, it will mean that Maple will be able to manage multiples of the billions that we do today without significantly increasing our headcount. So all of that will mean ultimately more operating profits dropping through to the bottom line of the protocol.
A
Great. Well, last question for you. I saw that, I think this was some notes that your team sent to me and it said that Maple is targeting a $100 million in annual recurring revenue goal for 2026. And I wondered if you would talk a little bit about how you think you're going to reach that.
C
It's a good question and putting us on the spot. So our, our stretch target for the year is definitely 100, 100 million ARR. We're currently just over 30 million ARR. So we've been doing well, but we have about a 3 to 4x to go from here. The way that, that will work for us is we managed about 4 billion today. So what we would need to do is about 4 exit. So we'd need to be up towards, you know, between somewhere between 15 and 20 billion AUM. This is not unachievable. So if you look in Q4, Maple went from the fourth ranked institutional lender to number two, just behind Tether. So if we continue to gain market share there, I think it's very eminently possible for us to get to that number. And then today we, today deployments are lower, so as in there's not as much borrower appetite in the market. So what we're doing is one, we are speaking to a number of large borrowers. So now we're expanding to more exchanges, more crypto or bitcoin miners. So we're looking at more borrowed deployments. And then we're also looking at things like private credit on chain might we allocate there that will help pick up the utilization and bring up the revenues that the protocol earns. And ultimately it's that combination of more assets under management, higher utilization, rate of deployments, and branching into new areas like private credit that will help maple hit 100 mil ARR. So that's the goal, but still a lot of work to do.
A
All right, well, we'll have to see how it all plays out. I look forward to hearing an update from you in the future.
C
Yeah, we love that. Love to get back on.
A
All right, well, Sid, it was so nice speaking with you. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained.
C
Thanks for having me, Laura. My pleasure.
A
In a moment, we will talk with Paul Frambault of Morpho. But first we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.
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I'm back with today's second guest, Paul Frembo, co founder and CEO at Morpho. Welcome, Paul.
D
Hey, thanks for having me.
A
Morpho is a borrow lend protocol. It's most well known for its integration with Coinbase in a defi mullet setup where Coinbase users can have a centralized user experience, but then they're accessing an on chain protocol. Tell us more about that arrangement. What are some other features of it or just generally other features of Morpho that you think people should know about?
D
Sure. So I guess the first thing to know about Morpho is that Morpho is an infrastructure for people to build their own on chain lending and borrowing use cases. We don't manage assets or issue loans. Ourselves as a DAO or as an entity. Instead, we provide people with a stack that they configure the way they want. And if they want a specific asset as collateral or a specific compliance, a specific risk, they basically control. They control the code, they control the risk, and they implement it in the way they want for their product, basically. And so in the case of Coinbase, the Coinbase app used to have a centralized lending product back in the day. And it was a great product, but it was kind of limited in terms of the liquidity and the rates that you could get there simply because the balance sheet and the loans that were issued were coming from centralized sources. Whereas in an open setting, in the blockchain setting, if you end up plugging directly into the blockchain, you have basically global access to capital. Right. So they basically deployed specific lending market tailored to the use cases they wanted to do. And now on the other end of the spectrum, you have other users coming from externally of the Coinbase platform. Could be like the bitenders of the world, could be like the Binance wallet, could be OkX, et cetera, that basically are lenders in the Morpho network that will provide capital to the Coinbase users. So moving into the blockchain to power this lending and borrowing service allows them to basically tap into global networks of liquidity, which allows more competitive rates for their users, but also deeper liquidity. So basically the way it was built is like, hey, Morpho provides this permissionless, immutable, configurable structure for them to basically specifically tailor to their use case. And then around that, Coinbase did what Coinbase does best, which is like crypto product experiences. And so fully abstracted away the ability to lend and borrow on the protocol. And so there is a wallet behind the scenes, the user does not see it. There is gas, there is a chain, but the user does not get to see any of that. What they only see is a web2ux. There is complete feature parity with your traditional product, except that this time it's super powered by Web3 Infrastructure, which allows you for again, deeper liquidity. Better pricing is mostly what it brings you.
A
Okay, so you launched that a year ago or a little over a year ago with Coinbase. So far I think it's seen about over $2 billion in total loans. And I wondered if you had certain expectations going into the deal and what has actually surprised you in terms of what has actually happened?
D
Yes, I think the overall ambitions are bigger and I think from the start they were big. I think we're on track to where we want to be. Surprisingly, I think we thought of those goals as quite ambitious back in the day, like a year and a half ago when we started building the thing, it was really a completely new approach to DEFI and everything. For the very first time we were breaking out of those, you know, Defi native sarcos. Right. Like most of Defi today, to be frank, is pretty crypto native. Right. In terms of user base and the people that actually get to benefit.
A
Right.
D
It was the very first attempt ever to get to users that were not here to do some Defi looping, but were actually using their Bitcoin as collateral to spend or to buy a house or to buy a car or spend on their Coinbase card and, and do some payments, etc. And so it was hard to anticipate, but I think in general it was on track with our expectation of what we wanted to do. And then soon after we also launched the other side, which is the earn and the yield side of things, which is basically the Coinbase. Lenders that are earning yield through Morpho on the platform are basically financing the other side, which is very interesting because now you end up in a situation where Coinbase builds this internal flywheel where the more lenders they get on one end, the better the product is going to be for the borrowers and vice versa. The more borrowers come in, the more interest are paid to the lenders. So it's very interesting business approach from Coinbase perspective. I think they've executed amazingly well and inspired as well a lot of people. That was the very first Defi integration and I think that just inspired everybody else, to be frank. Every single fintech, every single large distributor that is moving money around, they're like, oh, right, that makes sense. Moving on on chain rails will allow me to have cheaper, more powerful financial services. And this is basically the momentum of the so called Defi has been reproduced across pretty much every single large player.
A
Yeah. So I'm going to ask you about a few more of these deals that you have. One of them is a new integration with Bitwise. That's for their on chain vault, which is targeting 6% yield on USDC. Explain how that differs from the Coinbase arrangement.
D
Yes. So the key thing to understand with Morpho is like, unlike the Compound or the Avis of the world, we're not operating the lending market ourselves, we're not asset managers, we're not brokers between lenders and borrowers, et cetera. Right. Instead we provide a stack for everybody that want to do non custodial asset management, such as Bitwise for example, to basically create what we call a vault, which you should think of as a product to basically earn park your usdc and if, or usdt, like if you think of the stablecoin as like the checking account, the Morpho vault is the savings account.
C
Right.
D
And so this savings account needs what we call a curator, someone that can in a non custodial way, allocate your money into different lending markets.
C
Right.
D
And the role of Bitwise here is to be the asset curator, the person that's going to basically manage that strategy. And what happens compared to Coinbase is that Coinbase in their case, they're just distributing the product, they're not operating the curation of the product. For example, Coinbase uses another curator, they don't use Bitwise, they use Steakhouse Financial. Right. So if you're lending on the Coinbase app behind the scenes, there is a similar player to Bitwise which is called Steakhouse, that would manage the money to power the yield of the service. Right. And their role is basically all the time figuring out what is the new bars to underwrite, what are the collateral assets that we could accept, what are the people that we could believe in to basically fund their activity. Right. And this is a fundamentally very different model than what you have in traditional lending models, where it's more of a DAO that is operating like the risk parameters. Here, it's the free market. Anyone can come in, create their own vault. And if you have risk management capabilities, you can basically discover who is eligible to basically receive funding from you. And then you can bid, you can propose a rate and then people get funded for their collateral, which is Bitcoin or eth or maybe no collateral at all. You don't need collateral in this model, you just need the lender trusting you.
A
Okay, so there's another really interesting deal that happened which involves Morpho, sorry, Apollo, I meant to say, and Apollo Global Management committed to acquiring up to 90 million Morpho tokens, which is about 9% of the supply. They'll do this over 48 months. And Apollo Crypto is also using Morpho in its MEV USD product. Tell us more about that deal, how it came together, what you think the significance is.
D
Yeah, so Apple and Morpho are working together to support on chain lending markets on Morpho's protocol. It's currently too early to disclose any specifics, but we expect to hear more details later this year.
A
Okay. All right, well I guess I just generally am curious. It feels like the strategy is, so you launched on chain, but then now you're making a lot of deals to kind of go after users. So talk a little bit about what that strategy is and how you came up with that.
D
Yeah, so I think basically the general idea is that the world is coming on chain. You have basically two different aspects to that. You have the distribution and you have the operation of the markets. Morpho provides the infrastructure and what we've seen with the coinbase use cases, you have crypto native operators that operate products for crypto native distributors. And when you think about players like Apollo coming in and others you should think about is like now fintechs that have not much to do with crypto are going to come on chain to power their financial services. And the V2 of the DeFi wallet is basically going to be fintechs that are running on chain products that can be run by traffi traditional finance with the traditional finance trust and expertise. So that really the evolution that we see coming in 2026 is getting more traditional players to operate those services on chain with the trust and the expertise that they bring, which basically creates a nice flywheel. Like the more serious the market operators are, the more trusted they will be by new distributors. And the more distributors we bring in, the more business there is. So you have more asset managers coming in, et cetera, et cetera. And so this is personally what I'm excited about.
A
All right, so you know, a number of these products would be considered quote unquote, defi mullet style products, you know, something a little bit more centralized or fintech looking on the front. And then, you know, the actual financial wizardry that's happening in the background is on chain. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about when you think this type of product makes sense. You know, what kind of like principles or different features make it work and what it is that the Defi protocol and the centralized partner need to do to make it successful.
D
Yes. I think it really comes down to two things. So first you need the core piece of infrastructure that the distributor needs is account abstraction. So having your own wallet that has capabilities that you can spin off for every single one of your users. If you are a distributor that manages money and your users have a money account, you should spin off a wallet for them that they should control in self custody. You hide it from them. You have a bunch of services today, whether that is like preview from Stripe or Fireblocks now have their own solution that Basically you're going to embed into all of those products. So that's the first step. And once you have the wallet, you have access to the chain, Right? So why, what is interesting to have in the chain in order for this to be interesting? What we've noticed is that distributor wants infrastructure that they can own and that they can control. They want to control the code, they want to control the compliance, they want to control the risk, the fees, everything. Right. And this makes sense, right? For a lot of those distributor like they spent the last 10 years owning distribution but not owning infrastructure. Right. Because they were relying on traffi for the infrastructure piece. So they think of defi as the opportunity for them to extend and be able to own, end to end, the products they offer from distribution to infrastructure. So how does that work in practice? You want a DEFI infrastructure, not a defi product. What I mean by this is that they care about having control. And what does that translate in practice is like having your code being immutable, that not relying on someone that can upgrade it and change the parameters of it, where you have billions of dollars of your own users is very, very important for them. Or for example, making sure you can control the risk profile you expose your users to without having to rely on specific types of governance that you need to trust. You don't want to have those trust assumptions. You want control end to end. And so that's like the second ingredient to success after account abstraction is control. And then the third one is openness and global networks. Why moving on chain in the first place? Well, you need the financial product to be better. And how do you have the financial product that is better? By aggregating intents from all over the world. Right. The reason we have every single exchange like, you know, plugged into Marvel, whether That is like crypto.com, gemini, Coinbase, like Kraken, OKEx, Binance, everybody is moving there is because we connect everybody. And so when you basically take a loan, you're able to get liquidity from all the other players at the same time. And so you move from a world where everybody has their own backend with their own exchange that is segregated with segregated liquidity, to a world where everything is globalized. And as a result you get much better financial products because it's more efficient and get better prices again, deeper liquidity, etc.
A
Okay, so you're soon going to be launching the V2, or at least that's the focus for this year, and that will shift to having fully market driven rates Tell us more about V2 and why you chose the particular upgrades that will be in it.
C
Sure.
D
So I guess the first part of Morpho, the first innovation we introduced, was really about externalizing the risk management. We thought DAOs were not good at risk managing. They were pretty slow. And frankly, it does not make any sense to ask your token owners to vote on thousands of risk parameters every day. And so the first thing we're like, hey, shouldn't be the token owners underwriting people, should be the market underwriting people. And so really what we believed in is we want to build financing infrastructure more than a crypto lending product that allows anyone to underwrite anyone through on chain rails in an open way. And why is that interesting? Well, because now, because the system is open, anyone can come in with their ambition, their aspiration to do stuff and they show why they should be trusted. Whether that is some collateral, whether that is some identity and people can underwrite them. That was the initial idea and we came up with this idea of externalizing the risk and getting those vault managers to underwrite. Now the piece that is missing now is that we externalize the risk management, we don't externalize the rate management. So what does that mean? It means that the asset managers currently in the morpho stack, well, basically don't get to choose the rate. The rate is still determined by a formula. So in, in defi lending, and ever since the compound days, like many years ago, the way interest rates have been driven is through a formula. And that formula can be immutable, it can change, it can be driven by governance, but it's basically variable rates that depend on the liquidity of a given pool. That system is great when you have no spark player that can bid and can define the rates. When you have low liquidity, when you have a high gas constraint, that's really a beautiful innovation. And all credit goes to the compound team, by the way, for this. That was, that was really, really awesome. But we feel like, and talking to a lot of tradfi players and like, frankly, this is what I've been doing for last, like year and a half is absolutely not the way things are done in Tradfi. And there's, you know, 30 years of innovation behind them, there's a reason they do the way they do things. They want expressivity and control on the price for the risk. It's as simple as this, that if you are underwriting people, and it seems obvious when you say this, but you need to basically set the price yourself, that's number One, number two is maybe you want to lock in the capital for longer, maybe as a lender in order to be able to fund different types of ambitions, different types of loans. Well, you may want to fund people over one month, two months, three months, two years, who knows, directly from the chain. And so really we thought the key missing piece in lending today was a term structure where you can have fixed rate, fixed term lending and borrowing. And that was not only key from an infrastructure perspective to allow people to express their intents, but also purely simply from a product perspective on the borrower side. You also want predictability when you're borrowing. When we get integrated into those large distribution platforms, the number one feedback that we get is the rate is variable. I'm buying a HASS right now. I can't, I can't have a variable rate to buy a house. Much more practical considerations, but both matter.
A
Okay, so one other thing is when the V2 launches, what is it that people will be able to do that you feel like right now they're limited with V1?
D
Yes. So there are two key changes. What won't change is, is as a user, you could still be able to earn yield on your stable coins, right? And you'll still have a vault that provides you a very liquid experience to earn yield on your stable in crypto. Now what you can do now above than what we were able to do before is borrowers can borrow fixed rate. And so you can lock in a specific term and a specific fixed rate as an asset manager. So the person that are cooking the savings products, right, the on chain, non custodial savings product that are vaults, they have now more levers to pull to be able to provide better interest rate, better liquidity. And this is basically issuing those fixed term fixed rate loans. And while it may not matter for the lender who's still earning a variable savings rate, it really matters for the asset manager curator that is underwriting those loans. And then the third thing that changes is that if you're willing to trade liquidity, if you don't care about being liquid, you can earn more. And that's like the big difference is like today there is one liquidity profile in DeFi. We basically are under the impression in DEFI that this is only up technology unless you get hacked in case you go to zero and DeFi protocols can never lose money and you can always exit. That's sort of like the current status of the value proposition. But that's not the reality of financing in finance. The reality is that sometimes people don't repay and sometimes there is bad debt or sometimes people need money to borrow for more than one block and they effectively need to borrow for 20 years for long term financing. Morpho is going to provide infrastructure for people to do those type of lending agreements as well.
A
Okay, so I did also want to ask, you know, we are in this period where the Ethereum foundation has finally come out and said that they're not going to be focusing on an L2 centric roadmap and they'll be, you know, looking to scale the L1 more. I happen to notice that Morpho V1 is on almost 40 chains. Many of them are Ethereum L2s. I, I saw already V2 has a number of different chains that it will be on and I wondered how that is changing how Morpho thinks about where it plans to deploy or how many chains it plans to deploy on.
D
It's a good question. So the first thing to know is that for us deploying on a chain is easy. We are just an immutable piece of software that anyone can come in and deploy permissionlessly in to operate. And so that's like the key difference is that we don't have to basically we can deploy any new chain and then an NSF manager can come in and create their own vault and start lending to people. That's like the first thing to know about Morpho is that we're much more agnostic of where we deploy. As long as you're EVM compatible and your chain has the most recent version of the EVM and practical concerns like this now, what does that mean in general for the chain landscape? It's like a question I ask myself every few months because the landscape changes. But basically we went from there is just Ethereum to there is Ethereum op, Mainnet, Arbitrom and maybe Solana. So like five, six players to we're going to have a myriad of chains and we started deploying a bunch of chains everywhere to then maybe we're not going to need that many chains and we're going to refocus around maybe a few chains. Maybe there's going to be Tempo Base, Ethereum, Robinhood Chain and a few others. And so what I'm thinking right now is you're probably going to have five, six dominant chains for quite a while and then you're going to have a bunch of very small chains for dedicated enterprises. Right. And so I think this is what the constellation is going to look like. And then I think over time we're going to Go through cycles of bundling and bundling, bundling and bundling until maybe one day we have one single atomic world computer that scales to like, you know, infinite for offput. I don't know if one day we'll get there, but it feels like this is where everybody's going. Like when you look at like Solana's roadmap, Ethereum's roadmap, arbitrum optimism zero. We all converge to the same idea of having some form of sharded computer. Whether you call this a multi core, a super chain, you know, shards, it's basically the same thing, right? And so maybe at some point there is a winner takes all, but I think it's going to take so much time, especially because there is so much past dependency with distributors. Some distributors are married to some chains. You know, Robinhood was Robinhood chain, Coinbase with base, Stripe with Tempo. And so this is going to create such a moat that's going to take, you know, ages, like 10 years to re aggregate. Maybe not 10 years, but you get the idea.
A
Yeah, no, that makes sense. So I did also want to ask you, I'm sure you have seen that your competitor AAVE is facing a number of challenges, you know, with the DAO and the Labs entity. And this is actually a pretty common theme now in crypto. You know, we're sort of seeing that, you know, once the second Trump administration took hold, it's, you know, much more open to crypto innovation. And that is emboldening some protocols to take a more centralized stance without fearing that they'll run afoul of the sec. You know, Paul Atkins himself is very knowledgeable about crypto, quite open to it and also I think a lot of these protocols are noticing that there's just a lot more difficulty acting nimbly with a DAO structure. Stanley Chubb of AAVE Labs, he did write in a recent essay on X about this, talking about how, you know, trying to do DAO governance for AAVE with, you know, the temperature check and then the voting period and all of that, it just doesn't allow the DAO to, you know, react in. Yeah, as nimble away as a centralized entity would. So Morpho doesn't have a Labs entity, it just has a foundation. So explain, you know, how you came to the decision to do it that way and you know, explain how you think it kind of addresses some of the issues that we're seeing with these DAO structures currently.
D
Sure. So a few comments on what you said. So I guess the first thing is so by the way, I don't think AAVE as a competitor to Morphi. I know a lot of people like to compare the two because there is a word lending somewhere. But I think of AAVE aspiring to become like the GP Morph Morgan of the world. Whereas Morpho aspires to become infrastructure for GP Morgan. Like Compound was a competitor to aave. Now Compound builds on Morpho, for example, and has some vaults typically. And we have a bunch of asset managers like this. And AAVE could build on Morpho as well, leveraging Morpho's technology and everything to manage their assets through their DAO and everything. Now that said, and I think this distinction is important because it also dictates how we've been thinking very differently about governance in general. In the case of Morpho, the protocol in itself, the product in itself has no use of governance or token. We're just a piece of code. We're just an immutable piece of code, like Uniswap, if you will, where basically we have a stack for lenders to meet with borrowers and we call that a market. And then for lenders that don't understand how to choose their borrowers, well, there is a vault that can aggregate multiple markets. And that's really the two pieces of technology which you should think of as like a non custodial fund on one end and a non custodial market on the other end. And when we were thinking from first principles like three years ago about this, we're like, hey, well why would we have this world DAO process and everything? The protocol is the most decentralized you could think of. I can't even change the protocol. No one can. There's no oracle that I need to change or update. Those are like the asset curators that are choosing those risk parameters. I don't update the risk parameters. Right. And so really what the Morpho token was about is owning a share of the network value of the protocol. So what is that exactly? Basically, Morpho aggregates a bunch of lenders with a bunch of borrowers, right? Forms the state of the smart contract. So it's a piece of code that has a specific state, Right. And this is an act of value creation. You bring together two sides of the market that were not knowledgeable of each other. Like if we take the example of coinbase that are able to borrow from like 10 other exchanges through a neutral media, this is value creation. And so as a result, the Morpho protocol can take a fee and the Owner of that fee, the owner of the treasury is a set of token holders that have programmatic control over this value. And that's as simple as this. Right? And now it seems to be a very trendy thing with unification from Uniswap or AV Labs, like you know, changing things. I don't know if they still have labs or not, but yeah. So we've been doing this for a few years now and I think this is what is the single most aligned thing to do. We believe in tokens generally more than we do in equity. We believe this is the best way to own a share of a decentralized network. We believe this is the best way to align the different players around that network, because at the end of the day, it's super programmable, so you're able to distribute ownership in that network in such a way that you can incentivize growth of that network, whether that is through incentives to distributors, to lenders, to bars, etc. And incredibly powerful tool that has been super instrumental to the growth of Morpho. But at the end of the day, it's super minimal. We're just like a French foundation that is researching about what should be the next version of the protocol and publishing this code on chain and giving ownership to token owners.
A
And so the Morpho token, what is that used for?
D
Yeah, so think just. There is no, to be very extremely clear, you don't use the Morpho token as part of the product and there's no reason you should be. And frankly, I don't think, except if you're an L1 with a staking protocol, I don't think there is any use that is fundamental to the Uni token, to the Morpho token or to anything in the product. I mean, the token is just the ownership in the treasury and the fees of the future fees of the protocol as a token order. You own the protocol network value. That's the only thing.
A
Okay. And so there's like, I thought there was some governance in Morpho.
D
So there is, but the scope of governance is super limited to those parameters. Right. Which is basically owning the smart contracts and owning the fee switch and deciding what you do with this budget that you create in order to create more growth for the decentralized network. So it's pretty simple. But at the end of the day, you can't really expect a very complex task from a large set of token owners. What you expect from them is to be economically aligned with the growth of the project. You can't expect risk Expertise, you can't really expect them to be super active. You can expect them to make one decision from time to time around the budget on how to the key headlines on how to grow the decentralized network. That's what you can expect from a network token, basically.
A
Okay, so I'm sure you're very well aware that AI is infiltrating our lives ever more and ever more rapidly. We've seen several instances of AI hacking smart contract code in research settings that, you know, OpenAI and Paradigm did this with their EVM bench work. There's also Anthropic did some work with Scone Bench and I wondered how you're thinking about that for Morpho. How do you protect against that?
D
Yes, this is a good question. I think in general smart contract development is extremely, extremely, extremely hard to secure. I think it's underappreciated in this industry how hard it is to build a lending protocol that does not get hacked, for example. And if you take the list of the top 50 lending protocols, I don't know how many were hacked, but probably the majority. And it's pretty crazy when you think about it compared to other industries. And I think each of those hacks were extremely specific bugs. There is nothing, there are some patterns, the famous reentrancy hacks and everything, but in some cases they're extremely specific, which makes AI somewhat relevant to capture maybe the 40%. And I think EVM bench from Paradigm and OpenAI is approximately the result that they have is like 30% of the bugs of a code arena. So I think it can reduce a lot the noise for auditors so that they can focus on those extremely long tail bugs that can create the most amount of damage. And so I don't think necessarily of it as a threat, but more like as a tool to improve the security during the development process. I think one tool that we use internally a lot at Morpho is formal verification. We have a team of formal verification PhDs and engineers where it's very interesting because it's about formally deterministically proving that the piece of code is executing according to a specific spec. And what is interesting is that it is fully deterministic, which is very different from the nature of AI, which is by design very probabilistic. What that means is whatever is how smart the hacker is, whether that's AGI or whether that is a black hat according to the spec, we've mathematically proven that it will operate in a specific way that's only possible and easy to do. If your smart contract is small enough, is simple enough, and the vast majority of the DEFI contracts days is very hard to do formal verification on. And in the case of morpho, it's actually very easy. It's also the case in some contracts like Uniswap that can provide us this confidence that even if you're AGI, you're not going to do because it's math, basically. Unless AGI breaks math, in which case we have a lot more problems to care about. But yeah, that's the general idea. And by the way, I think blockchain and AI marries beautifully in that sense. It's like blockchain is deterministic computing and it's like executing code exactly how it was extracted. Whereas AI is having a lot of agency and, you know, executing with high confidence and those like bond very well with one another. And one of the use cases I'm most excited about is basically usage and how you can use defi through agents. And how do you enforce guardrails that are deterministic with smart contracts around like an execution environment for your agents that has agency over certain amounts, certain spend limits, etc. And can then operate on the chain in a very Internet native way, which looks very futuristic and very exciting.
A
And are you seeing AI agents using Morpho or how would you figure out that that was happening?
D
So we probably can't know the exact numbers, if I'm being honest. We experiment a lot internally, we work a lot on this, we even have a team dedicated to this. And so, and that's been, you know, that's been very interesting and far more promising than I have to acknowledge. I was a little bit skeptic initially as we were starting to work on this. I think this is very promising in
C
general
D
and I don't think I will be able to know exactly what share of users are agents, but, you know, I think it's probably safe to assume that it will be a majority in a few years.
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, give it some time. All right, well, last question. What's next for Morpho?
D
Well, you know, I think I've touched on this a little bit. I think just morpho in general aspires to more than just crypto in the product sense. Like we really think of crypto as an infrastructure that's going to make financing better. But really what I care personally about is financing. How can I fund the ambition of people and how can I matchmake as much as possible lenders with borrowers? And in other terms, people have aspiration with people that believe in them. Turns out blockchain is phenomenal way of doing that. But when I think about what's next for Morpho, it's like how can I get into more real world lending markets? Again, of course powered by the blockchain, et cetera, but how can I bring in more traditional lenders? And you mentioned Apollo as a partner, which is literally the largest credit fund in the world and bringing in those traditional players such that we can access real world demand, real world usage powered by the chain and distributed into real world applications that have nothing to do with crypto, where crypto is completely hidden, the wires are unnoticeable from the user. And this is frankly where I spend like 90% of my time is trying to bring the two together and to provide the same financial services. There's nothing going to be extraordinary new to people. They're still going to require a loan or yield. It's just going to be so much cheaper and so much more accessible for those that don't have access to it. And the reason is again, global connectivity, global competition, and at the end of the day, what you're doing with this is really reducing the cost of people trusting each other. And this is where I get excited about And I think 2026 is going to be mostly about getting those fintechs integrated into Trend five.
A
All right, awesome. Well, it has been super fun chatting with you. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained.
D
Likewise.
Episode Title: Is the DeFi Mullet Strategy the Best Way to Bring Finance Onchain?
Date: March 12, 2026
Host: Laura Shin
In this episode, Laura Shin interviews two prominent figures in DeFi on how onchain protocols and fintech partnerships are reshaping lending and finance: Sid Powell (CEO & Co-founder, Maple Finance) and Paul Frambault (CEO & Co-founder, Morpho). They dig deep into institutional adoption, the DeFi “mullet” approach, technical scaling, DAO governance, AI’s impact, and the convergence of TradFi and crypto.
Guest: Sid Powell (CEO & Co-founder, Maple Finance)
Timestamps: [00:40–34:25]
"Maple does not lend to retail users. Our counterparties ... are typically asset managers, trading firms, exchanges, family offices..." – Sid Powell [01:09]
“As more assets get tokenized, you can do more lending against it ... it becomes more useful to tokenize more assets.” – Sid Powell [16:02]
“I think you can choose equity or a token, but you can’t have both…you end up with conflicting priorities.” – Sid Powell [23:33]
“Imagine if Steve Jobs had to go and get approval from an entire committee… for every product decision … you might never have had bets like the iPhone.” – Sid Powell [27:39]
“I do think we’re going to get there... able to manage multiples of the billions that we do today without significantly increasing headcount.” – Sid Powell [30:06]
Guest: Paul Frambault (CEO & Co-founder, Morpho)
Timestamps: [35:15–72:27]
“They [Coinbase] basically deployed specific lending market tailored to the use cases they wanted … now you tap into global networks of liquidity.” – Paul Frambault [35:49]
“We're not asset managers or brokers ... Instead, we provide a stack.” – Paul Frambault [41:08]
“Every single exchange ... plugged into Morpho ... because we connect everybody.” – Paul Frambault [46:27–49:27]
“Shouldn’t be the token owners underwriting people, should be the market underwriting people.” – Paul Frambault [49:45]
“We believe in tokens more than equity ... this is the best way to own a share of a decentralized network.” – Paul Frambault [60:08–63:50]
“Unless AGI breaks math, in which case we have a lot more problems…” – Paul Frambault [65:58]
“It’s probably safe to assume ... it will be a majority in a few years.” – Paul Frambault [69:29]
“How can I fund the ambition of people ... blockchain is a phenomenal way of doing that.” – Paul Frambault [70:20]
Sid Powell (Maple):
Paul Frambault (Morpho):
This episode provides a real-world glimpse into how DeFi is “going institutional,” not by fighting TradFi, but by fusing it with transparent, programmable blockchain rails—often hidden under familiar interfaces (“DeFi mullet”). Both Sid Powell and Paul Frambault highlight how the next wave involves deeper integration with asset managers, fintechs, and traditional finance giants, the ascent of tokenized real-world assets, and the importance of secure, composable, chain-agnostic infrastructure. Equally, both contend with the balancing act required by DAO governance, product nimbleness, and the coming influence of AI—ushering in a new era for onchain finance.