Building Futures: The Lasting Impact Of Engineering Careers | Workplus Ep. 7

Building Futures: The Lasting Impact of Engineering Careers

In this episode of the Workplus podcast, host Richard Kirk is joined by Claire, Director of Engineering at Oxford Instruments. Claire shares her inspiring journey from a Northern Irish all-girls school to leading a global engineering team developing scientific imaging technologies. She discusses the power of STEM education, the vital role of creativity in engineering, and her passion for empowering young people, especially women, to pursue impactful careers in science and technology. This episode uncovers the surprising reach of engineering, from telescopes in Hawaii to airport security and cancer research, and why people, not just problems, make work worthwhile.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Everything around us, from smartphones to telescopes, was designed by engineers
• Curiosity and creativity are essential traits for engineers
• Oxford Instruments helps scientists push the boundaries of life and physical sciences
• Seeing products used in real-world research boosts engineering engagement
• Inspiring the next generation of engineers starts with better role models and exposure
• Non-linear career paths can lead to leadership and innovation
• Young people don't need university to have a successful engineering career
• The arts and STEM must coexist for well-rounded innovation
• Mentorship programs like SistersIN help young women envision their potential
• The best part of work is helping others grow and succeed

BEST MOMENTS
00:00:04. “Everything in your pocket or on your person was developed by an engineer.”
00:01:27. “I’m the director of engineering, so I have quite a large engineering team.”
00:03:35. “We’re kind of experts in low light imaging. Cameras that go on microscopes, telescopes.”
00:05:36. “I like the fact that one and one equals two and always does.”
00:07:15. “Innovation and through creativity and curiosity.”
00:09:24. “Seeing people grow… there’s no other feeling like it.”
00:10:31. “Spent two hours talking about the black hole, like who does that in their job?”
00:14:02. “I've been a STEM ambassador for… oh my goodness, I don’t know, for many years.”
00:20:34. “This is a way to really tell these young women, you have got what it takes.”
00:26:13. “Probably the best thing and the worst thing and the same thing, and that’s other people.”

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Transcript

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I think we will cross. 500 billion in stablecoin issuance before the end of this year. And then I think like over the next year off to that. I could see us easily crossing a trillion, maybe pushing 2 trillion by then. We send all of the loans out using smart contracts that we developed. So instantly the loans are very transparent. You can see the performance in real time, and we're not reliant on banking operations to serve our borrowers set. We use cryptocurrency as collateral instead of using real estate or cars or stocks and bonds. It's very important for us that we are transparent. So we put all of the loans on the blockchain. We now have a channel where we can source capital from DeFi. It's very flexible and very scalable, and that our competitors in the centralized or cdfi lending space don't actually have access to. Welcome to High Stakes, the podcast committed to demystifying the institutional adoption of blockchain technology. I'm your host, Alex Nauka, and today we're elevating the Web3 discourse in a series of conversations with industry iconoclasts that are shaping the future of Web3. Now let's get started. Welcome back to another episode of High Stakes. I'm your host, Alex Walker, and today I am joined by Sidney Powell, the CEO of Maple Finance. Welcome. Said Alex. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So said some of our audience might not be familiar with Maple Finance. So do you want to just give a quick intro on the company and sort of what you all do? For those who are not familiar with Maple Finance? We call ourselves an institutional lender or an on chain asset manager. Our background was doing loans to crypto native companies, so we do a lot of over collateralized lending. And this can be to centralized exchanges, could be to trading firms, could be to funds who operate on chain. But in each instance those loans are over collateralized. And this forms part of what we would call on chain asset management. More recently, we expanded our product set so that we don't only have over collateralized lending, we now also have a Bitcoin yield product. And so as a bit of a high level snapshot, we have around 1.25 billion in assets under management on the platform at the moment. We run a loan book of north of 450 million. And then we have about 150 million in our Bitcoin your product. But most folks on the team, come from a banking or financial services background. And, I'm no different. I used to do banking in Australia. Yeah. I was just going to say, you know, maybe a bit of tying your background into, you know, sort of what inspired you to start Maple Finance. So as you sort of mentioned, you started in trad by, at a large Australian bank. I'm curious what lessons are you learned from the traditional debt markets that inspired you to start Maple in sort of the early days? It's a good question. So I spent multiple years in banking in an area called securitization. And so this this involved helping lending companies to borrow. And so I'd say that that was kind of the most important part of my career in banking was that I saw how lending companies worked, from the transactional side and as a partner who helped them source funding. And really that gave me a kind of view into the inner workings of how you build a lending company. And then from there, I actually wanted to go to more of, startup or a smaller, more nimble style of company after having spent, you know, my early career in banking. And so I had an opportunity to go to a commercial lending company in Australia, and then I ran their treasury. And this gave me a different perspective. It's one thing to see a business from the outside. It's a it's another to be in the kitchen seeing how the sausage is made. And so at that company managing its treasury, I had to put in place facilities. And then I was kind of involved in, reporting. I needed to understand the business in order to talk to that company's financiers and the banks who were working with it. And that's where I one met my co-founder, Joe. And then two, we had the original idea for Maple, and it's changed a lot since then. But the original idea was, could we do tokenized bonds on chain? So something akin to securitization or, or what I've been doing when I was in banking. But the key insights from working inside those companies is the financial system is actually extremely fragmented. It's very opaque. Even as a company that worked in the lending sector to see kind of what goes on inside banks. And, and it was just very tough to scale a lending business. And so part of the opportunity set that we saw in, Web3, crypto DeFi was, you can potentially dramatically lower the cost and the barriers of entry to, to get into the space. And that was ultimately kind of what drew us to Maple. And then the idea of being able to do this programmability and automatically, when you. Describe to folks what Maple does sort of under the hood, right? I mean, ultimately, you know, this is, you know, lending, right? So there's, you know, sort of this process of originating, underwriting and then managing, you know, sort of the the loan book. Right? So as you think about, maybe the supply chain or I'll call it the value chain underneath the hood. How do you see that as it works at at Maple? And like, what are maybe the unique properties that you guys have innovated on? It's a good question. I would say, just to boil it down to as simple a value chain as possible, I would say Maple acts as an intermediary. And what this means is we borrow from certain people. So these would include high net worth family offices, funds. But effectively they want to pay us to provide them with yield. And they pay us by allowing us to take a portion of the interest that, is earned from lending their funds out and keeping that as revenue for ourselves. On the other side of that, we have borrowers who want to take out loans to grow their business or for trading activity, or they might be an investor and they want to, use some of the crypto that they're holding for to buy a new position or, you know, to pay for opex, something like that. But it's all institutional borrowers on that side of the market for us. And the type of lending that we do is not totally dissimilar to what happens in trad. It's just that we use different assets. We use cryptocurrency as collateral instead of using real estate or cars or stocks and bonds. And so what we've tried to do to make it, simple and kind of easy to understand for people is it's very important for us that we are transparent. So we put all of the loans on the blockchain. This makes it more visible to people who are giving us money to investors who are involved, as well as to the borrowers, so they can see what happens with their collateral. So transparency is one of the first core key things. And then the other one is liquidity. So the fact that anyone can participate by, using stablecoins from anywhere in the world minus sanctioned jurisdictions gives us a distinct advantage in speed. And so I read a lot of history, and I kind of look at the history of innovation and new industries. And I think every 30 years or so, you get a new technology that comes along that allows somebody who's doing something that is kind of similar to what happened before, but leveraging the new technology to really run away with the prize. We saw it in retail when first Walmart started doing big box retailing, and then 30 years later, Amazon came along and started doing e-commerce retailing. And I see that our natural competitors in the traditional finance space are lenders like Apollo and Aries and Blackstone, and they have leveraged banks like banking technology. And what we have an opportunity to do here is to use blockchain technology and stablecoins, which allows us to move faster, make our products cheaper for them, and, attract users and customers from all over the world, instead of only relying on those who are in the banking system of a given country. And so that's really how we sort of plan to disrupt and compete with those incumbents. And when you. Think about the landscape of lending specifically and sort of the digital asset realm, how would you describe that landscape and where Maple Finance fits in? In my sort of simple, sort of like way of looking at the world. There's sort of like the centralized finance sort of lenders. Right. And then there's sort of the DeFi lending protocols. Right. And, and everything can be sort of put on a spectrum between sort of those two bookends. How do you see it? Do you view it differently, or would you take a more nuanced approach? Just curious. No, I think that's actually the best thing, the simplest way to kind of view the ecosystem as it stands today. I think historically the CFI or a centralized lenders are probably 95% of the market and 5% was DeFi. And historically, those, centralized lenders included BlockFi, Celsius, Genesis, Babel, a number of players who are not around today. The DeFi players include RV, Morpho, spark and Compound. And I would say now the market has kind of flipped where probably more of that is happening in DeFi. And these two camps are a spectrum, as you said. And so you have fully DeFi, like, let's say RV, where everything is run algorithmically, there's no centralized underwriting decisions made, and anyone can use the platform provided they have crypto that they can put in. And then you have fully centralized, which would include somebody like a LED in a two prime, a galaxy, or a tether. And there it's, it's a single team, making the decisions. And they don't they don't really use smart contracts for anything. They take in Bitcoin as their most preferred type of collateral. And then they either wire funds through the banking system or they send stablecoins out to borrowers. If you look at us where kind of in between. And that's actually it's a strategic decision by us because we felt like it was the best way to differentiate ourselves from the other DeFi players and versus the C5 players. We're able to then access more kinds of funding or DeFi funding specifically, and have transparency that they just can't match with their CFA, centralized business model. So if you look at the kind of the defining features of how we work, we send all of the loans out using smart contracts that we developed. So instantly the loans are very transparent. You can see the performance in real time, and we're not reliant on banking operations to serve our borrowers. Set on the other side of that, we are actually integrated with all of the major custodians, so we can take in native BTC, which is something that of A and Morpho and Spark and the other DeFi lending platforms can't do it. So we can actually take collateral from any blockchain and then send a stablecoin loan against it that is actually viewed as a feature by our borrowers because they prefer to keep their assets in regulated custodians rather than just giving them to us to control. And also, they don't really want to put them in smart contracts. They're they're collateral business. So we actually have an advantage then when dealing with our institutional customers. And so it's come from finding that niche. Meanwhile, our other, centralized lenders, while they have the ability to work with custodians, they do not have the ability to access funding from DeFi. And so if you look, we've had some of the bigger partnerships we've had this year have been handle more. So Sparc, these have all been sources of capital that has come into the Maple platform, contributed to our AUM growth, to north of a bill. But we're the only institutional lender who can make use of that. And I think that's a really important differentiator. And that's enticing larger borrowers to come to us because they they know that we have this reliable source of funding. Excellent answer. And, you know, I like to ask other operators this question because I think it's it's a good one for, you know, folks to have a real strong sense out. When you look at Maple today and, and operating the businesses as a CEO, what metrics do you look at to really, you know, sort of gauge the health of the business and sort of overall momentum? Is it AUM, which would be sort of like the, you know, maybe the more simplistic answer from, you know, again, a lending standpoint. But I always find that operators have a more nuanced answer around this. It's, you know, never just one thing. So I'm curious how you would answer that question. It's a very good question. And the types of metrics that you would look at are, in my view, there are particular to lending. And so historically, the way that every lending company goes bust is they don't run out of money, they incur too many credit losses. And a common way that they mask that is through AUM growth or the size of their loan book. So what I want to do is kind of is kind of give a balanced answer and say, you actually correct that. The simplest answer is AUM is probably the most important thing. However, you want to caveat that or qualify it by looking at things like loan loss performance and credit losses. Because as I said, like it's the credit losses that will sink a lending business. And so I'd say, what's that like 50% AUM. Then you would look at revenue and then you would look at credit losses or defaults or delinquent loans. And then the other thing that I would look at is health and diversity of the books. So how, many different borrowers do we have? It's not a good position to be in as a lending company to have like one major borrower who, if they either defaulted or repaid their loans, you know, would have a material impact on your business. And similarly, on the other side of that, you don't want to be beholden to to a small number of lenders where if they withdraw their funding, your lending business is toast. So in that order, again, it's it's, revenue loss performance and then like diversity of the loan book. So let's, let's say borrower and lender concentration, I look at all of those. And more recently we've been trying to to really diversify by the books so that we have more and more customers. And, and we think that that will make us more competitive in the market if we're able to do that. And when you think about or, you know, sort of maybe the ground state today in terms of the range of assets that are supported and sort of the associated yields for lending against those assets, maybe give us a sense of what that looks like today at Maple Finance and maybe how it evolves. No, definitely can do that. Well, actually, one other thing I would add, just on the metrics, the most important thing to look at on revenue for a lending business is what you call the net interest margin, or Nim. This is effectively what do we lend at and what do we lend out at, and what do we have to pay for that for the funds that we borrowed or taken? And so that's the other kind of margin that we look at. And for us, that's generally between call it like 150 to 200 basis points on the loan, book the chorus and crypto bank lending. And so is, of course, Bitcoin. This is your kind of your your hub. And then you have your spokes which are going to be other ideally other large cap assets. It's funny as we were smaller we did more bespoke collateral like we would do Pendle TX tokens. We're still open to things like that, but now we actually have to think a lot more about how the collateral that we use scales. Like if we're going to do a piece of collateral that only allows us to do 5 to 10 million, dollars worth of lending because it's newer or smaller in size. It's actually problematic for us because our loan book is growing so fast that we need to be looking at assets where we can do 50 or 100 million loans against them to really justify the time spent assessing them and putting them through due diligence. So if you look, the other assets that we we are currently lending against, Solana is XRP, preferably, I think, where we're going to try and focus on things that are in the top 50 rather than starting to go too far off pace, because as I said, we're actually out the supply side of our market, so how much capital we have to lend out is growing faster, faster than it has before. And so we we just can't spend a lot of time on things working under 5 or 10 mil against it. So really top 50, most of it is anchored around Bitcoin. This is the asset that most lenders are comfortable with as well. As I look at where the space is going, I also think it's it's the one where most institutional interest is going to be focused and directed as, as more transfer firms start to come in. And just out of curiosity, when you start talking about sort of grapes, how much of that is being done as you guys underwrite? Sort of like what I'll call I you sort of more manually and on an idiosyncratic basis based on who you're lending to and how much, if any, is being done algorithmically. It's mostly being done by us bilaterally. We, we have calculators and tools that we use and mostly you're going to base it on what the purpose or futures funding curve is, is telling you about the cost of the risk free rate, so to speak. So if you look at Bitcoin back lending is going from anywhere from like 8 to 10% at the moment annualized. And that would be 70% LTV loans. So 145% over collateralized. And then as you look at the altcoins they start to price higher. What happens though is that if you have a coin or an alt coin that has staking and a staking yield, you can actually price the loan lower because you'll collect the yield from staking the collateral. So like Solana was a great one for this, where you were able to price the low and actually lower or cheaper than Bitcoin. Back to lending because you could keep the yield on the collateral. And then as you get into all coin territory, when you get to a sort of point around the 50 to 100 range, you're probably looking at like 15, 16% on those types of loans. So it can make quite a wide range. And it's very, reactive to macro sentiment. Like in March, a rate on Bitcoin back lending was down around six for a brief period of time, whereas in December it was up around 12. So we went from 12 down to six. Now we're back to like 8 to 10. And so there's a lot going on in those sort of macro. And obviously the prices are very sensitive to that as well. So maybe let's talk a little bit more about the institutional borrowers in DeFi. And you know, to maybe, you know, dive into this, maybe give the audience a sense of who are the typical borrowers on Maple Finance, and maybe even to go a bit deeper on that. You mentioned before, you know, various, you know, sort of borrowers come to Maple for different reasons in terms of why they want, you know, to borrow, but maybe the like more common use cases, that you're seeing from those borrowers for, you know, by their coming into the lending market. I think the borrowers who come to Maple into the lending market in general, it's going to be a variety of reasons. So if you look at, centralized exchanges and prime brokers are coming to leverage, they provide their customers with either margin trading or margin loans, and they want to borrow from a player like us so that they can make loans themselves at a higher rate. So you actually have kind of like a stack, a lending stack, that you have people that we borrow from, then the people that we lend to, and then they're their ultimate customers. And there's kind of there's kind of borrowing on borrowing going going on there. Then you have firms who might want it for opex reasons. So this could include a mining company who doesn't want to sell their crypto. They instead want to hold on to their bitcoin. And so they borrow to to pay for wages, equipment, electricity, that type of thing. And then you have high net worths and family offices. They're typically less frequently in the market. And what they might want to do is, is say buy a house. If that's somebody who could have held crypto for ten years now, you know, they're thinking about buying a piece of real estate or, some, you know, some kind of lifestyle purchase. And so they're borrowing for a longer term use case, particularly if it's like a piece of real estate that they want to buy. And then you've got venture funds and liquid funds. They might have a position that they really like. They want to borrow against it and buy more of it. Or they might be doing a looping or a yield strategy Unchained. So they've got something that an LP position that yields more than the cost of borrowing from us. And so they borrow from us and then increase that position and lever it up. But it you can see the thing in common is that usually these are business or investment purposes that they borrow for. And I think over time the number of different reasons people will borrow will increase as a space matures. But right now it is very much focused on those reasons and. Sort of on the other side of the ledger, do you see any trends in sort of the institutional liquidity moving into the DeFi credit markets? You know, anything to report on there from sort of the front lines? As you said, what we've. Seen is that there are more trad fi firms or firms that have historically not done that much with crypto looking to enter. I think the headline example of the most visible one would have been Cantor Fitzgerald announcing in in July of last year that they wanted to enter Bitcoin back lending, and they've made a few announcements on it since then. You know, this is a very well-respected, broker and asset manager in Wall Street who's signaled that they see a profitable market or a segment here. And then we've seen not necessarily on the lending side, but on the trading and the brokerage side, folks like Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, different trading platforms have said that they will start to open up crypto trading for their users. And from there, once people start buying bitcoin, the next thing they look at is can they borrow against their bitcoin, or can they get a yield lending against bitcoin? Or can they get a yield on the Bitcoin itself? And that is one of the reasons that we added our bitcoin you know, product. But I would say this year since the inauguration and since the what I would call a change in regulatory posture, it's now much more open to innovation and is very much set on making the US a leader in digital assets. The risk that you're underwriting as a traditional firm dealing with crypto is now dropped significantly, and so many more of them are kind of willing to enter the space. We've had conversations with a couple of, traditional commercial banks around whether we could get a wholesale facility by placing Bitcoin as collateral. I wouldn't say any of them are near term prospects, but even the fact that I can get a call with them is totally different from where we were last year. And it's really encouraging and it's, exciting to hear, especially when you start to hear about some of the bigger names that are, you know, signaling, that they're coming into the market in a really interesting and new way. Now, you've obviously been of the crypto space for a little while from a lending perspective. You've seen a lot of past market volatility. I'm very curious as to how you think about, you know, sort of risk management, obviously, you know, underwriting and sort of the stability around managing a loan. But when we see this type of volatility is sort of, you know, challenging to manage. And so I'm curious what you attribute, you know, sort of the the ability to, you know, sort of manage sort of the high vol that, you know, tends to take place in the crypto space as relates to running, lending companies. So how do you think about risk management and, and sort of the things you all do with Maple Finance to ensure, you know, what I would call stability in the face of a volatile asset class. That's a good question. And the risk management of a volatile collateral is, is kind of the core or the bread and butter of what we have to do. So I'll use two different examples. So very basic Bitcoin back to Lloyd would be a 70% LTV. So if every $100 Bitcoin you give me I give you $70 of lights. Now the things I have to focus on are two triggers. So how much does Bitcoin have to drop before I'm asking you to to send me more bitcoin or to partially repay your loan. And then how long do I give you to do that. And then from there how long do I give you before I'm just selling your Bitcoin. And so for us those those two levels are the margin call level let's say to 70% LTV loan. I'm doing a margin call at 80% LTV. So normally I would give you 12 hours Alex, to then either place me more collateral or start to repay your loan. And then at 85, I'm just selling your bitcoin and then I have to sell it before I incur 15% slippage. So you can see I'm still leaving myself a relatively conservative buffer. It would be pretty unlikely for me to lose money in bitcoin like with Bitcoin collateral. Using those triggers, I would have to not be able to get the bitcoin to an exchange or a market maker, or not be able to monitor the price for a really long time to to see those kind of movements. Then if you contrast that so that that's how we manage risk at a basic level, what do we set the margin levels to? What do we set the initial LTV to. Because we have to size it appropriately to take into account the historical volatility. If I'm do what I'm doing for Bitcoin. So if I do a 70% LTV loan for bitcoin, I'm not going to do that for a coin number 100 or 200. Right. Ideally I'm staying away from coin number 200. But let's just use it for illustrative purposes. I would probably do an LTV at like 40% if I'm doing a more volatile token. So if I want to do XRP, I'm probably doing that at 4,050% LTV and I'm setting the margin. Call trigger is tighter there, but it just gives me more room for more margin for protection. And it also it corresponds to the coin just having been more volatile over the last 24 months. But then we also look at where is it operationally supportive, like can we go trade this? Can we go sell the position or an exchange if we wanted to? This is why we kind of like the large caps, because they move billions of dollars a day. Whereas if I'm trading in a coin that I'm if I'm holding a coin as collateral, that only trades$5 million a day, I'm never going to be able to get out of it to, to protect my position. So that's why we try and stay away from, from the smaller cap stuff. But that is that is the core of it with a little bit of extra secondary emphasis on can, you know, what's the rest of the party's balance sheet, so that we know that they can top up collateral, because you don't necessarily want to want to do a loan to a borrower where at the first sign of trouble, you're going to have to liquidate them because they're not going to be able to post collateral. It's not a good experience for them. It's not a good experience for us. And so we try and avoid that. Got it. And you know, I think one of the other things to maybe call out is I think you mentioned this before. You guys have recently announced partnerships with BitGo, Copper and Hex Trust. Really around allowing borrowing and lending activity to happen directly from the major custodians. Not sure if you want to highlight anything that's special about, you know, those that sort of sort of partnership, especially as it relates to, you know, sort of this concept of, you know, risk management and sort of, you know, dealing with different counterparties. I think having custodians is very helpful for in a couple of respects. One is that when we're dealing with really large counterparties, if they are a better credit than us, they don't necessarily want to trust, entrust their collateral with us over time, or they might have compliance restrictions that prevent them from doing that. And so by us having the partnerships with Anchorage and BitGo and other custodians, we're able to remove that from the equation so they can put their Bitcoin with Anchorage in a Tripathi. The Tripathi agreement just means that we can ask for the collateral if something goes wrong. You know, if Maple happened to, to wind up shop tomorrow, the borrower doesn't have to trust us. They can just ask the custodian for it, for their collateral back. So having those custodial relationships has opened up a wider set of borrowers, and also made it possible for us to do business with larger borrowers who wouldn't, you know, who don't use smart contract stuff like like Ivy and who wouldn't deal with with smaller lenders. The other reason it's important is that these custodians also bring us business like a lot of them don't want to be in the lending business themselves. And they don't want they don't want to bring a potential borrower to us. And then I'll say, okay, that's fine, we'll onboard you, but you have to take your bitcoin out of, you know, custodian A and put it in custodian B because we like them better. So the fact that we've been on board with all of these custodians, we did a deal where we had over$100 million of collateral and, we allow we onboarded with a custodian who brought us that deal. And so they got to keep the business, we got a new relationship, and the borrower got to keep the custodian very light. So that was a win win win. And those are the those are the the relationships we try and built. Awesome. And you know, in the past year you you all have introduced sirup to finance. And you know, I think for the audience maybe getting, you know a little bit from you on, on sort of, you know, why you decided to launch it to complement Maple's existing business and sort of the thought process around it. It was very interesting time when we launched sirup Usdc last year. So the initial thinking was that we could see all this growth happening on the DeFi side for for other protocols, whether it was Athena, more for a handle, and we're kind of missing out on that. So what we wanted to do was we wanted to have a distribution channel where we could do partnerships with these great teams, whether it's Spock or Pendle or Morpho or Athena. We want it to be part of those ecosystems and not to miss out. And we also wanted to have a vehicle where we could take in, let's say, retail customers or your DeFi. Well, customers. They aren't really comfortable operating inside the US or dealing with us partners. And so prior to that, we had a space that was set up in Delaware and they could only be taking money from accredited investors. So we did was we set up a came and structure came in by structure. And this allowed us to kind of work with more DeFi native firms and to do things like Morpho looping. The Pendle PTT split and allocations from, from spark. So I think that ended up being a massive strategic win for us because like I like I mentioned earlier, Alex, we now have a channel where we can source capital from DeFi that it's very flexible and very scalable, and that our competitors in the centralized or CFI lending space don't actually have access to. So I think it's it's ultimately been a huge strength for us having that. But at the time, it was just to introduce a kind of DeFi distribution channel so that we could better compete with those other parties that I mentioned. Got it. And then as part of that, there's obviously the, you know, sirup token that was obviously, you know, new relative to that. And, maybe talk to the audience a bit about the benefits of the token holders. You know, they're interesting sort of incentives and so forth, and how that, you know, adds value or impact, sort of the overall ecosystem around here. And sorry, I just had one more thing. So I'm sure you sec. It's also given us a channel to do partnerships with some of the exchanges now. So they all have their own Urn programs or Web3 wallets. Now users from OKEx, from Binance, from Bybit or big Cat can all click through and deposit into Maple through sirup Usdc using those Web3 experiences. So the partnership, it's really been quite powerful and strengthening those partnerships for us. And then the other point around the token, sorry, I think the token really brings it all together for us. So previously until last week, we actually had this kind of point of confusion where we had the NPL token, which was the old governance token, and then we've had the Sirup token, which was the new governance token, and we had the two existing in parallel. Now that migration is finished and we just have the single sirup token, which is the sole, sole governance token of the entire protocol. What it does is it gives everybody long term alignment in the success of the protocol. It allows people to stake. It gives a mechanism to return value through doing token buybacks. But it also allows everybody to participate in governance. Everyone can everyone who holds state sirup can go and vote on significant policy decisions and strategic direction for the protocol. But I think a very important point that is often missed in the DeFi space. We don't have a separate equity entity that weighs capital into it, and that end that has separate or sometimes conflicting interests versus the token holders. We only have the token. Everyone on the team has been incentivized with the token. And then the founders, Joe and I, we just have the tokens. We don't have separate equity in an entity that has raised from bases and that is collecting the protocol revenue. So I think that that unity of alignment, not having a separated cap structure, which you've seen play out kind of not so well in cases like Uniswap, where should Uni labs be getting the revenue? Should the Uni token holders be getting the revenue here? It's just all small token holders all the way down, very. Very aligned and simple. So one of the things said that you've mentioned publicly is, is really a an interest in expanding geographically, in the two regions that, you know, and at least seen in the public domain have been Asian Latin America. So I'm curious when you when you look at those two regions, what are the opportunities that you see and, and how are you sort of tailoring Maple's approach to access those, those, opportunities regionally? I'll talk about Asia first. So it's just been a very historically been a very tough region or tough nut for us to crack. I think it's very relationship driven. It really does rely on having boots on the ground with local knowledge and local relationships, and the ability to go and meet people in person. It's it's less of a do business over, over zoom calls type culture and more of a business to business. You know when you when you can shake the hand of the person in front of you and meet them. In real life, Asia is even more strategically important for us now that we have the BTC yield product and in essence, that is partly an effort to reach and better penetrate that market. We know that BTC ownership is very heavily concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region. And so now we have what we think is the best risk adjusted yield on BTC in the market with our, our partnership with Corda Dao. And so we've actually just hired our first Asia BD person, out of Hong Kong. And already in their first two weeks, they're, they're meeting a lot of people and starting to establish those partnerships. So we are really making a concerted effort to do better and to increase our footprint in that region. Latam also has very high B2C penetration. So I think the BTC yield products should do well, but they also unlike Asia, they actually have more problems with inflation. And so I think stablecoins also and stablecoins also have a really wide penetration. Down there. So I think in that region, either of our Usdc, or BTC, your products can find a receptive audience, but we're still in the process. We haven't really built out a beat down there. So that's probably that's probably the next stage for us in terms of team expansion. Got it. So maybe pivoting quickly to, you know, talking a little bit about where there's application and where you see, you know, sort of use cases for AI relative to what you've seen both of Maple and sort of beyond and DeFi. So obviously somebody that sort of more to this intersection of trend and Web3 or you're not, you know, immune or sort of oblivious to sort of technology sort of clashing with sort of traditional. Yeah. You know, use cases and so forth. So, you know, when you think about how you see AI affecting this space, you know, Web3 and even specifically, you know, DeFi, how do you see it today? How do you see it into the future? I think today, the first use cases that we're seeing have been more on the trading front, trading meme coins. A16z. But I think how we're looking at it, we at Maple are trying to use it to kind of scale the operations of our business. So I'm trying to use it to, to make, the guys on my team more productive, whether they are doing credit risk analysis or whether they're doing operations or sales, we're actually running a pilot at the moment where we're trying to do AI back testing of collateral volatility to work out what should the settings have been on certain loans, and whether we should accept or reject certain collateral types. Currently, this review process can take us two weeks, you know, up to two weeks. And so if we can have I do it much faster, it's going to be a huge time saver, for our team because it currently involves people from different functions at Maple. So it's very it is very labor intensive. So I think risk the risk management in DeFi is going to be hugely powerful. And then I think where it goes eventually is you will have a lot of DeFi will actually just end up chat interfaces, where you're having an AI agent kind of execute certain strategies for you, whether it's take out a loan from Maple, if you're, an institutional borrower or maybe or somewhere else and deploy to one of maple's yield strategies. So I think near-term it's been trading what we're in the process of at the moment is seeing the application of AI for risk management. And then where it's going to go is it'll actually it'll probably be a significant part of the, the user experience of DeFi. And do you think on that user experience side, if you think about sort of the institutional, you know, sort of vector that wants to participate in DeFi, do you see that as, as not only an application there where they can, you know, sort of interface in a way that, you know, either optimizes for, you know, returns or helps assess risk and, and just sort of makes an overall better experience. Is there anything else that you would say for that institutional DeFi sort of user that like, do you think is is, you know, I benefits. The trouble with the institutional user is that a lot like a lot of companies just don't even allow AI to be used. And so I was I was thinking I was talking with one asset manager the other day who said, hey, you know, I had I put together this slide deck, but I had to do it on my personal computer because workbox. ChatGPT. What is going to drive the AI adoption is just like which industries are most competitive or have the most internal competition, because that's going to drive the use of AI to kind of to be more efficient, to save cost and to to churn out work faster. I think for the institutional user, you're going to see AI automate a lot of trading algorithms and the find tuning of trading algorithms. I've been a big fan of Ren Tech or Renaissance Technology. They're the best trading firm of all time. But imagine that you had an AI who was constantly fine tuning their algorithms, all the time, 24/7, instead of just during during working hours. I think that would be tremendously powerful. And so I think for institution users, you really are going to see AI feature a lot in automation of like trading as well as risk management. Like for us, I would love to have an AI running 24 over seven in the background. That picks up anytime there's volatility on our collateral or anytime a borrower misses an interest payment and we need to reach out to them. So I'm going to ask a big question here. I'm maybe too big for the time we have left. But when you think about where you see Maple Finance's position in the broader financial system in ten years, how you think about that. I think of it as us being in the chain asset management space. I think we began as a lender and we were just joined purely over collateralized lending. And now we have products like the BTC yield. And so I see us being transitioning more into a kind of alternative asset manager who has a focus on credit, the closest, competitors that I would say that we are, looking towards over the 5 to 10 year horizon, Apollo, Aries, Blackstone. I see that there is this wave of technological disruption coming, which is crypto and blockchain and AI that these guys are missing the boat on and that I can use to make my business cheaper, faster, have more global reach than they can. And I think in the way of all kind of innovator's dilemma, like the way the innovator's dilemma plays out, is that they initially view this segment as super and attractive. I remember reading from, commentary insights from one of the Aries portfolio managers, and he was just, you know, just talking about how much of a waste of time crypto was and how terrible Bitcoin was as collateral. Well, this sector should the every new sector that ends up disrupting appears first as to cheap to attractive, and then it becomes bigger, and then the technology that's used to make it workable eventually finds applications in what these guys were already doing and starts to to disrupt them. That's what I'm looking at. I see, you know, Apollo is worth 150 billion. It's, you know, one of the largest alternative asset managers in the world. I don't see why all of that business can't be done on a blockchain using stablecoins over time. And that, you know, Maple is the ones to do that. So this is the question we asked all of our guests. We call it, the high stakes heartache. So what's your boldest prediction? For the Web3 crypto space or DeFi for the balance of this year, 2025? For the balance of this year, 2025, I think we will cross 500 billion in stablecoin issuance before the end of this year. And then I think, like over the next year off to that, I could see us easily crossing a trillion, maybe pushing 2 trillion by then. But I think the growth of stablecoins is really going to shock people how fast that takes off, particularly if you get something like the stablecoin bill approved this year, which really kind of puts it in a position as legal tender in the US. Awesome. Well what's that? What's park it there? Sidney Powell, CEO of Maple Finance, thank you for coming on High Stakes. I really enjoyed having you on and hope to have you back soon. Thanks, Alex. It was a pleasure. Awesome. Keep exploring and keep innovating. Learn more at Validation Cloud IO and follow us on X and LinkedIn to stay connected as we continue to shape Web3 for institutions. This is high stakes without Stan Walker signing on.