Sid Powell spent his early career inside the plumbing of traditional credit markets, working on securitisation, corporate finance and credit risk at National Australia Bank before becoming portfolio manager and treasurer at an Australian non-bank lender.
In 2019 he co-founded Maple Finance, an onchain asset manager that builds institutional credit infrastructure on public blockchains. The firm says it has originated more than $24 billion in loans and now manages more than $4.6 billion in assets.
In this In Profile, Sid Powell, CEO and co-founder at Maple Finance, discusses bringing securitisation onchain, why DeFi is judged by its worst week, and what it will take for institutional allocators to follow.
Tell us more about your company and its purpose
Maple is an onchain asset manager, meaning we’re a platform that uses blockchain infrastructure to manage both crypto and traditional assets. We build institutional grade credit infrastructure on public blockchains, pairing traditional capital markets fundamentals with the transparency and settlement speed crypto rails make possible. We started in 2019 on the idea that credit markets don’t need to be opaque in order to be safe. Every loan we originate sits on a public transparency page, so lenders can see collateralisation and performance in real time instead of waiting on a quarterly report.
Since 2022 we’ve originated more than $24 billion in loans across multiple market cycles, spanning secured lending and structured credit for institutional borrowers and lenders. More recently, we’ve built products like syrupUSDC and syrupUSDG that bring that same institutional grade yield to a much wider audience, including people on mainstream platforms who never touch decentralised finance (DeFi) directly. The purpose hasn’t changed since day one: make credit markets more transparent and more efficient, without cutting corners on risk.
What are some of your recent achievements you’d like to highlight?
An achievement I’m proudest of this year is launching our own token, syrupUSDG, with Robinhood and Paxos. It went live on Ethereum and on Robinhood Chain at the same time, so retail users had access to institutional-grade onchain yield immediately. It’s our first new syrup product in two years and the clearest signal yet that mainstream fintech is treating onchain infrastructure as credible rather than experimental. To demonstrate the scale, Robinhood alone reported 28.4 million funded customers and $369 billion in platform assets last quarter, and the Global Dollar Network that syrupUSDG plugs into has grown past $3.5 billion in circulation across more than 150 enterprise partners.
We also launched the Kraken Warehouse structure in June, a real, working case study in how DeFi capital gets put to productive economic use. I was particularly proud of this because I came from a securitisation banking background, and one of the original dreams for Maple was to bring securitisation onchain.
And finally, another proud achievement was Fortune naming Maple to its 2026 Crypto Innovators list, which meant a lot for our team.
How did you get into the fintech industry?
After years in traditional finance, I saw first-hand how slow lending can be. At National Australia Bank, I worked across securitisation, corporate finance and credit risk, then as portfolio manager and treasurer at Angle Finance, a non-bank lender funding small and medium businesses across Australia.
Both roles put me inside the plumbing of credit markets: structuring deals, managing risk, and watching how long it takes to verify collateral or settle a facility when everything runs through intermediaries and manual processes. I was looking for the next technology shift in finance and as I started learning more about blockchain and smart contracts, I could see that this would be a major platform shift which would enable new winners to emerge. This presented an exciting opportunity to try and build one of those winners. So co-founding Maple was a chance to build the credit market I wished I’d had on the other side of those deals: transparent, faster to settle, and just as disciplined about risk.
What’s the best thing about working in the fintech industry?
The best thing about working in fintech is watching formerly slow processes happen in real time. In traditional credit, verifying collateral, confirming a loan is performing, and settling a transaction can each take days. But on blockchain, that same information is visible instantly to anyone who wants to check it. That shift, from “trust me” to see-for-yourself, is what got me excited about this space, and it’s still what excites me most about it now. The other part is the pace of convergence. A few years ago, a bank or a brokerage building on public blockchain rails was a novelty. Now it’s a live product decision inside firms managing large volumes of real customer money. Being close to that shift, and building some of the infrastructure it runs on, is a front-row seat into the future of finance.
What frustrates you most about the fintech industry?
The industry still gets judged by its worst week. April was a rough month for DeFi broadly, with security incidents at other protocols driving real losses, and it coloured how a lot of people talked about the whole space for weeks afterwards. That’s a fair thing for outsiders to be cautious about. What’s frustrating is when caution turns into “this is all the same thing,” when in reality risk management, transparency and underwriting standards vary enormously from one platform to the next. We built our business on being the more conservative, mature and transparent option, and it’s frustrating when that distinction gets flattened in the coverage.
How have your previous roles influenced your career?
My background shaped how I operate now and I owe a lot to the mentors I had during my time in banking. Securitisation at NAB taught me a lot of fundamentals about structuring deals, analysing cash flows and downside protection. It’s fundamentally about breaking assets into cash flows and understanding exactly what’s backing a set of obligations, which isn’t far from how we think about structuring loans and collateral at Maple; it’s just moved onchain. Credit risk work forces a certain discipline, ensuring you don’t get comfortable with an exposure just because it hasn’t gone wrong yet. That instinct shaped how conservative we’ve tried to be about risk management and transparency at Maple.
My work in treasury and portfolio management, including managing funding, liquidity and a live book of loans to small businesses, is the piece that translates most directly to running Maple day to day. We balance growth against risk, and never assume a portfolio performing today will keep performing without active management. I don’t think I’d run this business the same way without having sat on both sides of that table first.
What’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?
The most useful mistake we’ve made was mistaking optionality for progress. Early on, we tried to advance too many initiatives at once. It felt ambitious, but it diluted focus and slowed execution. The lesson was that conviction only matters if it is concentrated. Since then, we’ve run Maple around fewer, higher-conviction priorities, with clear ownership and a much higher bar for taking on anything new. We don’t spend much time regretting mistakes. We extract the lesson, change the system, and move on.
What has the future got in store for your company?
At Maple, we’re excited about what’s ahead. Expect to see more of the fintech distribution model we proved out with Robinhood, and more institutions bringing real credit structures onchain the way we’re doing with our current facilities. I already said publicly that “every fintech will offer yield on stablecoin balances within the next two years.” Maple will become the credit manager behind most of that yield. On the institutional side, we expect to keep seeing traditional finance players move real credit structures onchain. That powerful shift towards onchain credit will soon simply be how a deal gets done. Maple is pioneering the future of onchain asset management, one deal at a time.
What are the next key talking points or challenges for your industry as a whole?
Regulatory clarity is the big challenge for DeFi. Guidance on how stablecoins get classified has become very real this year, and you can see the effect directly, with firms like Robinhood and Tempo shipping products that would have been hard to justify building eighteen months ago. The next challenge is proving that clarity was worth waiting for.
The next big bridge for the industry to cross is how we get institutional allocators to start deploying onchain. This is what will drive the next order of magnitude of growth. In a lot of ways, the blockchain space is still reliant on early adopters among retail and high net worth. Bitcoin ETFs, vaults and tokenised stocks are helping to familiarise institutional investors but as of yet, examples of them allocating onchain are isolated and rare.
The other conversation the industry needs to keep having, honestly, is about risk management standards. This year’s DeFi hacks showed that not every protocol manages collateral and underwriting in the same way, and the ones that do it well need to be louder about how, not just that they didn’t get hit. Transparency has to be a selling point the industry competes on, to help it build the trust it deserves.
The post In Profile: Sid Powell, CEO and Co-Founder at Maple Finance appeared first on The Fintech Times.
