Bitwise Makes First Institutional DeFi Allocation via Maple Finance

Bitwise, a digital asset management firm with over $12 billion in assets under management (AUM), announced its first institutional allocation to DeFi through Maple Finance, a DeFi and real world asset (RWA) protocol specializing in onchain credit.

The move signals institutional investors' desire to access onchain credit through a regulatory-compliant platform. Onchain RWAs offer more favorable alternatives to traditional yield bearing assets such as credit, bonds, and treasury bills, and some protocols are experimenting with the ability to leverage tokenized assets within DeFi.

Jeff Park, the Head of Alpha Strategies at Bitwise said “Across all of our active solutions at Bitwise, we’ve always sought to take advantage of crypto-native investments that generate dynamic, uncorrelated returns.”

“This partnership is a testament to the maturity and readiness of on-chain lending infrastructure, delivering the transparency, security, and efficiency that institutions require. The convergence between DeFi and traditional finance is accelerating, and Maple is at the forefront of that shift,” said Sid Powell, the co-founder and CEO of Maple Finance.

The amount invested has not been disclosed.

Bitwise launched in 2017, and is the largest crypto index fund manager in the United States, operating publicly traded BTC and ETH ETFs. Bitwise’s ETFs are the third-largest by AUM, trailing only Blackrock and Fidelity.

Maple Finance launched in 2021, and is the third-largest onchain private credit protocol, with more than $2.5 billion distributed in total loans, accounting for more than 10% of the sector’s $22.3 billion in total loans according to RWA.xyz.

The protocol was previously only available to institutional investors, but opened up to the public with its Syrup retail-focused arm in 2024. The move also triggered a token migration from the MPL token to the SYRUP token, which trades at a roughly $100 million market capitalization.