Inside Syrup: The Credit Book Behind the Yield
Syrup's loans can stay out for months, yet 95.8% of the $12.01B paid to withdrawing depositors arrived within a day. We read the $1.29B book behind the yield: how the return is earned, what supports the loans and how quickly the portfolio turns back into cash.
Key takeaways
Syrup turns stablecoin deposits into a managed lending portfolio. Most capital goes into institutional credit, backed largely by crypto collateral, while liquidity allocations and cash help meet withdrawals. Over the 90 days to 1 November, annualised growth in share value was around 5%. The question for a depositor is how that return is earned, what supports the loans and how quickly the portfolio can turn back into cash.
Syrup’s loans can remain outstanding for months while depositors receive their money much sooner. Across the three Syrup pools and the separate High Yield Secured pool examined here, nearly 96% of the money paid out arrived within a day of the original request. Cash, borrower repayments and liquidity allocations connect those timelines. Understanding how those sources work together is central to assessing a lender’s ability to exit.
1. How Syrup fits together
A lender deposits stablecoins into a pool and receives shares whose value reflects its assets and liabilities. Maple manages the portfolio behind those shares: the Pool Delegate approves loans and allocations, loan managers fund and account for them, and each loan contract records the borrower’s debt and payment terms.
High Yield Secured belongs to Maple Institutional and holds a separate USDC lending portfolio. It uses the same infrastructure as the Syrup pools, but access is permissioned and its strategy allows collateral to be deployed into staking or further secured lending.
This article follows syrupUSDC, syrupUSDT and syrupUSDG, with High Yield Secured included as a separate comparison. Funding, loan-life and withdrawal statistics cover all four unless stated otherwise.
2. Building the book
A pool share is supported by more than the loans it holds. Alongside borrower debt, the portfolio contains cash and capital deployed into other yield-generating positions. On 1 November, the three Syrup pools held $1.29B of Loan Book principal across 39 facilities. Another $257.5M of pool assets consisted of strategy allocations, cash and accrued interest. Together, these assets support depositors’ shares, although they return capital through different routes.
Maple’s warehouse facility with Kraken provides a concrete example of the financing it arranges. The facility supplies USDC to Kraken’s OTC lending programme through a dedicated vehicle, with Maple as senior lender and BTC and ETH collateral held by Kraken Financial. The financing supports another lending business, making the underlying loans, custody and legal structure relevant alongside the collateral value.
Once capital leaves a pool, Maple can add to an existing facility, receive repayments or fund another contract with the same borrower. Following those movements reveals how the portfolio changes as money is lent and returned. Across the four pools, that history spans 337 funded contracts since March 2024. At 1 November, 72 still carried material balances, totalling about $1.80B.
This count covers contracts across all four pools, including facilities used for liquidity allocations.
2.1 April’s contraction and loan turnover
April 2026 brings that movement into focus. Pool assets contracted sharply, as Figure 1 shows, while the loan contracts recorded their busiest funding month. The Kelp bridge exploit on 18 April intensified withdrawal pressure across DeFi and Syrup after leaving Aave with bad debt. Reading the month’s lending activity therefore requires following both the money going into contracts and the principal coming back.
The breakdown shows what made April so active. Of $1.97B funded across the four pools, $1.66B went into increases to existing facilities and $315M into newly funded contracts. Repayments and principal reductions during refinancing totalled $2.66B, leaving the outstanding book $685M smaller by month-end. Most of the funding activity was therefore an expansion of facilities already in use, within a portfolio that contracted overall.
As capital moves between facilities, the borrower address provides another way to follow it. The same address can receive funding through several contracts and borrow from more than one pool, allowing an exposure to persist as individual facilities are repaid or replaced.
2.2 Concentration
Following borrower addresses shows how exposures can persist across several facilities. At 1 November, 21 addresses owed principal in the three Syrup pools’ Loan Book. The five largest accounted for about 57% of the book, and the ten largest for 85%. Four addresses borrowed from more than one pool, connecting otherwise separate portfolios through exposure to the same borrower address.
The borrower ranking also sits within a concentration in lending currencies. USDC represents about 70% of the three Syrup pools’ Loan Book, followed by USDT at 17% and USDG at 14%. These are the currencies borrowers must repay. The assets supporting those obligations can be different, so lending a stablecoin does not limit the pool’s exposure to that stablecoin.
Looking through those obligations reveals another concentration: BTC and WBTC account for about 78% of reported Loan Book collateral. Different borrower addresses can therefore remain exposed to the same bitcoin price move. The stablecoin-backed facility introduces a different set of dependencies, which we examine alongside the crypto-backed loans in section 5.
3. Short notice, longer loan lives
The time between lending and repayment depends on the facility’s terms. Maple reports both Open Term loans, where principal calls initiate a contractual repayment notice period, and Fixed Term loans with published maturity dates. At 1 November, ten fixed-term facilities accounted for $426.7M, roughly one-third of the three Syrup pools’ Loan Book.
Those maturities extend from December 2026 to September 2027. The largest fixed-term facility alone carries $200M and matures on 30 April 2027. Open-term facilities offer a different repayment route, but their notice periods also vary.
Short notice can still coexist with a long-running lending relationship. Across both types of facility, about 78% of current principal sits in contracts opened more than three months earlier. Contract age shows how long capital has remained deployed; notice periods and published maturities describe the terms for bringing it back. The withdrawal history needs to be read alongside those terms and the assets held outside the Loan Book.
The repayment history offers one measure of how principal calls have worked. Among 192 completed contracts with a prior principal call, 191 reached zero principal within 24 hours of their final call; the remaining contract took about 5.2 days.
This sample captures calls preceding full repayment. It leaves unresolved calls outside the comparison and does not measure the response to every call made during a facility’s life.
Completed contracts show how long those relationships lasted in practice. Among 243 contracts with material funding that had finished, the median life was 84 days. About a third of cumulative funding passed through contracts that stayed open for six months to a year. Loans still outstanding are absent from that distribution, so the longest current facilities have yet to contribute their final duration.
Market conditions can bring several relationships to an end around the same time. October and November 2025 each recorded 23 principal calls. After the 10 October market shock, Maple reported working with borrowers to add collateral, repay early and shift backing towards BTC.
For depositors, the practical question is how repayments line up with withdrawals. Notice periods describe one source of future cash, but the pool can also use cash already held and liquidity allocations while loans remain open. The withdrawal history later in the piece shows how those routes have worked together.
4. From interest to share value
Borrowers pay contractual interest alongside service fees, but those payments do not translate directly into the return on a pool share. At 1 November, principal-weighted borrowing costs across the three Syrup Loan Books ranged from about 5.35% to 6.23%, including service fees. The income retained by each pool also depends on management fees and on where the rest of its assets are deployed.
Across the four pools, cumulative gross interest distributed through the studied contracts reached $137.2M by 1 November. Management fees deducted $12.3M, leaving $124.8M for the pools; service fees were separate borrower payments. These figures cover interest distributed through loan contracts, including contracts used for strategy allocations, while excluding direct Aave/Sky returns and top-ups.
Borrowing APR and share growth measure different stages of the income chain. Removing 0.25 percentage points of service fees leaves contractual interest of roughly 5.10–5.98%, before management fees. The retained interest contributes to a share’s return in proportion to the pool’s net assets deployed in those loans. Income from other allocations and top-ups adds to that contribution, helping explain why the loan-book rate alone does not determine share growth.
The following breakdown covers only the three Syrup pools and measures income recognised in their accounts through 31 October. It combines income accrued through loan contracts, net of management fees and including interest not yet paid, with Aave/Sky returns and top-ups.
As interest accrues, each share can claim more of the pool’s assets, even before all of that interest has been collected in cash. Over the 90 days to 1 November, the annualised increase in share value ranged from about 4.8% to 5.3% across the four pools.
Share value reflects the pool’s recorded accounts. Collateral can lose value before an impairment is recognised, so a rising share-price series does not rule out an underlying economic loss.
Loan-interest accrual remained positive in syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT through both the 10 October 2025 sell-off and the April 2026 Kelp incident. USDT’s yield spike on 19 April reflected a $124,018 additional distribution rather than a higher loan-accrual rate.
5. Looking through the collateral
At 1 November, Maple reported about $2.13B of collateral against $1.29B of Loan Book principal across the three Syrup pools, equivalent to aggregate coverage of about 165%. That ratio describes the book as a whole, but the collateral and repayment obligations remain attached to individual facilities.
On 2 April, one borrower address fully repaid two institutional-credit facilities: $320M in syrupUSDC and $80M in syrupUSDT. These repayments match the $400M decline in Maple’s reported institutional loan principal that day. Maple records the corresponding BTC and ETH collateral as returned. Aggregate reported collateral also fell, while coverage improved from about 152% to 161% as the book contracted.
5.1 Stablecoin loans
BTC dominates reported Loan Book collateral, followed by XRP and ETH, while WBTC adds further bitcoin exposure. USDC contributes another $50M, backing a USDT-denominated facility. These assets support different repayment obligations: crypto-backed loans depend heavily on market prices and collateral management, while stablecoin backing introduces issuer, redemption and depeg exposure.
High Yield Secured is shown as a separate comparison. Its eight facilities with reported collateral carried $273.9M of principal against $393.5M of BTC, ETH and cbBTC. Those figures remain outside the three Syrup pools’ Loan Book totals.
Maple’s app publishes assets, quantities, valuations and wallet links for individual loans. The Network Firm’s dashboard provides independent verification for syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT. That verification has its own reporting date and coverage.
The assets themselves also introduce dependencies beyond their market price. Custodial collateral depends on access and control arrangements, wrapped assets depend on their backing and redemption mechanisms, and stablecoins carry issuer and depeg exposure.
5.2 The buffer belongs to individual facilities
The $50M USDT facility backed by USDC reports 100% coverage, leaving no reported excess collateral above principal. Among the BTC-backed facilities, four $25M loans at one borrower address report about 127% coverage. These examples show why aggregate coverage cannot be treated as a buffer available equally to every loan.
Maple’s published process gives a borrower 24 hours to meet a margin call, subject to the facility’s terms, and allows liquidation when the applicable conditions are met. These arrangements sit outside the open-term loan contract, which records debt and payment terms. The disclosures improve what we can inspect, while control over collateral, legal rights and recovery after a default still depend on the particular arrangement.
We found no recorded loan impairments or repossessions in the contract set reviewed through 1 November.
6. Turning the portfolio back into cash
The lending book can remain open for months while depositors receive cash much sooner. Across the four pools, withdrawals paid by 1 November totalled $12.01B; about 95.8% of that money arrived within 24 hours of the original request and 99.2% within three days. Each pool pays its queue in order, with partial payments possible as liquidity becomes available.
Request size gives the longer waits some context. Fully paid automatic requests completed within a day received about $423,000 on average, compared with $1.64M for the five completed between 14 and 30 days. That small tail does not establish that larger requests generally wait longer. Reduced or cancelled requests and balances still awaiting payment remain outside the completed cohort, so the distribution describes completed exits rather than every request submitted.
Fast withdrawals rely on capital returning to the pools, as well as liquidity already available. At 1 November, the four pools held about $30.9M of cash, around 1.7% of their combined net assets. A large exit could therefore require borrower repayments or proceeds from liquidity allocations.
6.1 The liquidity policy
April 2026 was the largest payment month, with $2.25B withdrawn. Around the Kelp exploit on 18 April, Maple reported servicing more than $800M of redemptions through the incident and the following 72 hours.
On 22 April, Maple said it had unwound its DeFi lending positions and would hold stablecoins and US Treasury bills as a structural liquidity buffer. The legacy strategy contracts reviewed held no meaningful balances from 24 April. The current portfolio shows that capital can still sit outside the Loan Book, but through a broader set of allocations than just the Aave and Sky positions.
Those positions sit outside the Loan Book. Maple uses capital supplied to Syrup pools in lending markets, stablecoin positions, DEX liquidity and Cross-Pool allocations, alongside its institutional-credit facilities. They remain assets backing depositors’ shares, but they do not necessarily turn back into stablecoins on the same timetable. A lending-market position, a stablecoin redemption and an AMM position each carry a different route to liquidity.
One $30M syrupUSDG facility illustrates how capital can move between Maple products. On 30 October, the borrower posted BTC collateral and drew USDG from syrupUSDG. It then exchanged the USDG for USDC and deposited $29.9999M of that USDC into Maple Institutional – Secured Lending 2 USDC, receiving shares in that separate Maple lending pool. The transaction sequence does not identify which borrowers the USDC pool subsequently funds, but it does show syrupUSDG capital being converted and redeployed into another Maple credit vehicle rather than leaving the platform.
The same address also appears in Maple’s disclosed Non-Loan Book strategy contracts, including allocations to Aave, Morpho and Cross-Pool positions. This creates an operational link between part of syrupUSDG’s credit book and part of its strategy book.
Cash can meet withdrawal requests directly. Other allocations must first return stablecoins to the pool, so their contribution to the queue depends on their redemption, settlement and repayment terms. Keeping withdrawals moving requires an available buffer of idle cash or liquid allocations or capital returning as demand changes.
7. Following the next allocations
Maple’s broader allocation mandate expands what can sit behind a pool share. On 2 September, it announced three strategies, starting in syrupUSDT: lending secured by institutional credit and rated securities, financing vehicles holding loan receivables, and a hedged spot-futures basis trade. Each starts with a cap of 5% of Maple’s overall deposit base, so the limit is measured across Maple rather than separately against each pool.
Some of that mandate is already visible in the portfolio. The $7.6M BTC basis-trading allocation in syrupUSDT shows capital deployed beyond conventional collateralised lending. Following these strategies means examining their underlying positions and exit conditions alongside the loans.
Those positions also broaden what a lender needs to examine. Securities-backed lending and receivables financing depend on the underlying assets, counterparties and legal structures. A basis trade brings execution and settlement conditions of its own. The same questions that run through today’s book will apply: what earns the return, what supports the obligation and how the capital comes back when depositors leave.
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