Within a week of Robinhood Chain’s mainnet going live, the ecosystem already included Uniswap’s dedicated automated market maker (AMM), Arcus, a stock token and crypto exchange set up in collaboration with dYdX Labs, the derivatives venue Lighter and the spot exchange Rialto. Total value locked reportedly reached $75mn by 9 Jul, according to DeFiLlama, the majority of which was in Morpho’s lending protocol.
The World platform went live inside the Phantom wallet on 1 Jul to great fanfare. Some traders have accused World of using Solana for opening-week attention before decamping once the publicity paid off, to follow the next hype train to Robinhood Chain.
Robinhood’s established name, 28mn users and positioning towards retail users between the TradFi and crypto worlds create a tantalizing prospect for those crypto companies that are watching the increasing role tokenization has for traditional finance products.
It’s a prospect Sid Powell, CEO of Maple Finance, sees aligning with his ambitions for the company. Robinhood, the US retail brokerage that built its name letting ordinary investors trade stocks and crypto commission-free from their phones, has spent the past year pushing deeper into digital assets, culminating in Robinhood Chain, its own blockchain network. The crypto lending platform appeared partway down the partner list at the London unveiling, one of several protocols powering Robinhood Earn, the brokerage’s first decentralized lending product, with its stablecoin syrupUSDG. The partnership hands Powell’s firm retail distribution, and the tokenized assets that flow from Robinhood are the fuel for a much larger fight.
“In a couple of years we’re going to go and try to bid on the same deals they are,” Powell told Sandmark, referring to private credit heavyweights Apollo, Ares, Blackstone and KKR. “We’ll be able to offer either cheaper rates or higher yields or returns to investors and limited partners (LPs) because we’re using stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure to raise capital, to settle the loans, to track the deals.”
Before Maple can make its way onto that market, however, it needs scale. Robinhood, with nearly 28mn retail customers across 38 countries, is where Powell intends to find it.
DeFi’s growth problem
“The DeFi pie, I would say, over the last couple of years has been relatively static,” said Powell. “We haven’t seen a lot of new money come into the space, and so we’re looking at where the next sources of growth are for a player like us at Maple.”
His answer to that stagnation is increasing distribution through other apps. “We haven’t really had a foot in the door with the retail user community, and we don’t want to go building an app ourselves,” Powell said. “So partnering with phenomenal brands like Robinhood and other neobanks that will launch similar products is very strategically important for us.”
He said those companies have already done the legwork of attracting and keeping users. Stablecoin earn programmes are another avenue to keep users and liquidity on the app.
Maple launched syrupUSDG on 1 Jul, a yield-bearing wrapper for the Paxos-issued Global Dollar (USDG). The stablecoin sits inside a Morpho vault curated by Steakhouse Financial, and pays US users an estimated 7% annual percentage yield (APY) on lending activity Maple originates.
While the apps are accumulating users, Maple can add to its lending capital, boosting its ability to take on large lenders.
Blockbuster problem
Powell’s longer-term sights are set on addressing private credit, a market that is currently dominated by legacy institutions. According to reports from EY, at the beginning of 2025, the value of the private credit market sat at over $3tn, with $2tn managed by 53 entities. JPMorgan cites predictions the market will exceed $5tn by 2029.
Powell sees incumbents as structurally unable to respond to the push towards tokenization of the private credit market, disincentivized to pour money into building infrastructure for products that could eventually “cannibalize” already profitable products that “currently are a cash cow.”
The opportunity looks unattractive to them for now, he argued because “it seems like a tiny market.” He noted that only Apollo has developed anything of significance in the tokenization of the sector, with others lagging significantly.
“This is the same issue that Blockbuster, Walmart, Chrysler and Ford all faced when a new company comes in offering a disruptive product,” he said.
Buy, build or partner
The disruption Powell described is based on the influx of a new kind of collateral for onchain loans: tokenized equities. The value of the tokenized equity sector has grown at just under 500% in the last year, with many high-profile stock tokenization projects on the horizon. Powell said that lending against them needs infrastructure that crypto companies such as Maple have spent years refining.
“We are a much better place to lend against, say, tokenized NVIDIA or tokenized SpaceX than, say, a JPMorgan or a Citigroup or a private credit shop because we understand how to custody and move the tokens, how to check the liquidity on them,” he said. “We are plugged in with all the major OTC desks, the derivatives exchanges, to be able to manage that risk in a way that a traditional financial lender simply can’t.”
He also believes incumbents will struggle to build the necessary infrastructure in-house at a pace that matches the speed of the fast-growing market. He argued that the only route to traditional finance taking over would be a regulatory clampdown on crypto firms.
Instead, he predicts a wave of dealmaking as the giants latch on to the opportunity late. “There will be some competition, there’ll be some partnerships, and there will be a lot of TradFi firms who just do acquisitions to try to enter the space,” he said. This could include custodians and stablecoin issuers, as well as specialist lenders such as Maple.
However, based on how incumbents have responded to disruptive innovation in the past, Powell expects that they will keep underestimating the market until it is too late to buy their way in cheaply.
