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.

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Sam Reynolds

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