Sid Powell (Maple) on Maple's Comeback & DeFi Credit Markets (EP.652)
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Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Casinos may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.
Brought down by Bad Mortgage Investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85,000,000,000. This is a different kind of market, the Fed is asleep.
The federal government is stepping in to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of
England has pumped £75,000,000,000 more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.
They print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people started to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin.
The story of Maple Protocol is a comeback story that in many ways mirrors the journey of DeFi capital markets itself. Maple founder Sid Powell left his career in traditional debt markets in 2019 to build a more efficient crypto lending platform. At the time, BlockFi and Celsius had emerged as early crypto lenders using off chain underwriting, while Maker and Compound had surfaced as nascent DeFi market entrants. Powell had seen the inefficiencies of the traditional banking system up close and became interested in the concept of capital formation outside of these traditional guardrails. Maybe s
Yeah. I think that's pretty accurate. I mean, first of all, thank you for having me on. I've listened for a long time, so it's good to finally be on the show. But I do think we do treat it as kind of a job, right? Rather than something where you one day, some days you wake up and you have kind of the passion for it and you show up to work, and some days you don't and you stay in bed. People always viewed it as a profession, and so we try and show up and do the job whether we like it day in or day out. And some days it's worse than others, and you don't feel like doing it, but you still put on
Yeah. And a point there I'd highlight is I don't think there are many teams that have been around for that kind of time span having had a moment where you had to refocus almost or readjust without having completely pivoted into a different category. Like, lot of these things became restaking protocols one day or went from NFTs to some sort of modulized lending one day, and you guys have really stayed true to the credit and capital markets direction.
Yeah. I think we have tried to do that. Actually, just continuing the thought from the last question. I mean, I think two things that kinda influenced me were I really like this book called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Murakami. He talks about how he gets up. He has a routine when he's writing a book, and he gets up every morning at four or five in the morning, and he writes for five or six hours. Then he eats. Then he goes for a run-in the afternoon. And it's just the craft is getting up and just doing that every day, whether he feels like it or not. But on the pivot side, I
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