Within a week of Robinhood Chain’s mainnet going live, the ecosystem already included Uniswap’s dedicated automated market maker (AMM), Arcus, an equity token and crypto exchange created in partnership with dYdX Labs, derivatives exchange Lighter, and spot exchange Rialto. According to DeFiLlama, the total value was reportedly $75 million as of July 9, most of which was in Morpho’s credit protocol.
The World platform went live on the Phantom wallet on July 1 with much fanfare. Some traders have accused World of using Solana for attention during its opening week before decamping once the publicity paid off, to follow the next hype train to Robinhood Chain.
Robinhood’s established name, 28 million users, and retail user positioning between the TradFi and crypto worlds create a tantalizing prospect for those crypto companies looking at the increasing role that tokenization has for traditional financial products.
It’s a prospect that Maple Finance CEO Sid Powell sees as aligning with his ambitions for the company. Robinhood, the US retail brokerage that built its name on letting ordinary investors trade stocks and cryptocurrencies commission-free from their phones, has delved deeper into digital assets over the past year, culminating in Robinhood Chain, its own blockchain network. The crypto lending platform appeared halfway down the partner list at its unveiling in London, one of many protocols powering Robinhood Earn, the broker’s first decentralized lending product, with its stablecoin syrup USDG. The partnership transfers Powell’s robust retail distribution, and the token assets flowing out of Robinhood are the fuel for a much bigger fight.
“In a few years we’re going to try to bid on the same deals they did,” Powell said Sand markingreferring to private credit industry heavyweights Apollo, Ares, Blackstone and KKR. “We will be able to offer cheaper rates or higher yields or returns to investors and limited partners (LPs) because we use stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure to raise capital, service the loans and track the deals.”
Before Maple can make its way into that market, however, it needs scale. Robinhood, with nearly 28 million retail customers in 38 countries, is where Powell wants to find it.
DeFi’s growth problem
“The DeFi pie has been relatively static in recent years,” says Powell. “We haven’t seen a lot of new money coming into the space, and that’s why we’re looking at where the next sources of growth lie for a player like us at Maple.”
His answer to that stagnation is to increase distribution through other apps. “We haven’t really gotten our foot in the door with the retail user community yet, and we don’t want to start building an app ourselves,” Powell said. “So partnering with phenomenal brands like Robinhood and other neobanks that will launch similar products is strategically important to us.”
He said these companies have already done the legwork to attract and retain users. Stablecoin earning programs are another way to keep users and liquidity on the app.
On July 1, Maple launched syrupUSDG, a yield-bearing wrapper for the Global Dollar (USDG) issued by Paxos. The stablecoin is housed in a Morpho vault, curated by Steakhouse Financial, and pays US users an estimated annual yield (APY) of 7% on the credit activity that Maple produces.
As the apps continue to generate more users, Maple can increase lending capital, increasing its ability to take on major lenders.
Blockbuster problem
Powell’s longer-term goals focus on tackling retail credit, a market currently dominated by traditional institutions. According to reports from EY, the value of the private credit market was over $3 trillion at the beginning of 2025, with $2 trillion managed by 53 entities. JPMorgan cites predictions that the market will surpass $5 trillion by 2029.
Powell sees incumbents as structurally unable to respond to the push for tokenization of the private credit market, and unincentivized to pour money into building infrastructure for products that could ultimately “cannibalize” already profitable products that are “currently a cash cow.”
The opportunity seems unattractive to them for now, he argued, because “it seems like a small market.” He noted that only Apollo has developed anything meaningful in the symbolization of the sector, while others have lagged significantly behind.
“This is the same problem that Blockbuster, Walmart, Chrysler and Ford all faced when a new company offers a disruptive product,” he said.
Buy, build or collaborate
The disruption described by Powell is based on the influx of a new type of collateral for onchain lending: tokenized equity. The value of the tokenized equity sector has grown by just under 500% in the past year, with many high-profile equity tokenization projects on the horizon. Powell said lending to them requires infrastructure that crypto companies like 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 store and move the tokens, and how to control their liquidity,” he said. “We are affiliated 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 cannot.”
He also believes that 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 taking over the traditional financial sector would be stricter regulation of crypto companies.
Instead, he predicts a wave of deals as the giants respond late to the opportunity. “There will be some competition, there will be some partnerships and there will be a lot of TradFi companies that are just making acquisitions to try to get into the space,” he said. These could be stablecoin custodians and issuers, as well as specialist lenders such as Maple.
However, based on how established companies have responded to disruptive innovation in the past, Powell expects they will continue to underestimate the market until it is too late to buy cheaply.