Bitwise Asset Management has made its first institutional decentralized finance (DeFi) allocation, depositing into Maple Finance’s overcollateralized Bitcoin loans, Maple told Cointelegraph on March 6. Maple did not disclose the size of the investment but confirmed that Bitwise’s allocation is represented in Dune Analytics total value locked (TVL) figures for Maple’s “blue chip secured” strategy. Those figures show a roughly $5 million increase in Maple’s TVL between March 4 and March 5. Bitwise’s investment is “a testament to the maturity and readiness of on-chain lending infrastructure,” Maple’s CEO, Sid Powell, said in a statement. The allocation “signals a broader shift as institutional capital moves beyond conventional fixed income toward more efficient and scalable on-chain lending markets,” Bitwise and Maple said.
Uncorrelated returns
Institutional investors in the US are cautiously foraying into DeFi now that President Donald Trump has taken office. Trump has promised to make America the “world’s crypto capital” and nominated industry-friendly leadership to key regulatory agencies. “We’ve always sought to take advantage of crypto-native investments that generate dynamic, uncorrelated returns,” Jeff Park, Bitwise’s head of alpha strategies, said in a statement. Park added that Bitwise is keen to capitalize on the “emerging opportunity in on-chain credit.” Maple’s blue-chip secured strategy earns more than 9% APR, according to Dune. That is far higher than the 0.01% APR for supplying Bitcoin (BTC) on Ethereum via permissionless DeFi lending protocol Aave, according to Aave’s website. It also exceeds the approximately 4.3% APR on US dollar-denominated money markets, as represented by the Federal Reserve’s secured overnight finance rate (SOFR). Founded in 2021, Maple Finance specializes in on-chain credit strategies for institutions. Its TVL across all strategies exceeds $700 million, according to Dune. Bitwise is a crypto-focused asset manager with $12 billion in assets under management (AUM). It sponsors several US exchange-traded funds, including Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) and Bitwise Ethereum ETF (ETHW).