Maple Finance debuts Bitcoin-linked yield offering for institutional investors
2025-01-28
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Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Maple Finance has announced a new derivatives product to tackle institutional clients’ demand for digital assets. 
According to Maple, the new product will buy Bitcoin (BTC) call options using yield from collateralized crypto loans. Designed for institutional investors with a minimum buy-in of 100,000 USD Coin (USDC), it promises exposure to BTC with downside protection against BTC underperformance. The new product has a floor annual percentage yield (APY) of 4%, with the possibility of a maximum APY of 33%.
Maple’s new offering will compete for market share with a handful of similar products. Some examples include the National Bank of Bahrain’s Bitcoin investment fund, the protected Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) issued by Calamos Investments and Crypto.com’s recently launched platform designed for institutional investors in the United States. 
Structured crypto products targeted at institutional investors have been on the rise since 2024, helped by improved regulatory clarity around the world and an increasing acceptance of crypto as an investment vehicle.
Many of these new products promise to minimize downside risk, a problem that crypto enthusiasts are familiar with. According to Lucas Kiely, chief investment officer for Yield App, battle-hardened investors are looking for assurances that their tokens “won’t disappear in a puff of smoke,” as was the case in 2022 after the fall of FTX, Celsius and Terra.
Institutional investors increasingly see Bitcoin and other digital assets as essential parts of a portfolio, helping with portfolio diversification and inflation hedging. Bitcoin ETFs have attracted over $39.9 billion in net inflows since their debut on Wall Street in January 2024. 
In June 2023, Maple Finance announced the launch of a direct crypto lending program, filling the void left by the collapse of BlockFi and Celsius. According to HTF Market Intelligence, the Bitcoin loan market is forecasted to have a compound annual growth rate of 26.4% until 2030, with the market size growing from $8.6 billion to $45 billion.
Related: Maple Finance secures SEC exemption for onchain Treasury pools