Rapture #188: Q1 2022 Maple Treasury Report
More and more protocols are either producing their own reports on their treasuries or are hiring outside firms (Messari, Llama) in order to compile a report.
Continuing this trend, Joe Flanagan, the Co-Founder of Maple, recently published a quarterly report that covers the revenues and expenses of the Maple DAO. Note that this report by far is the most informative in terms of gaining insight into the financial health of the Maple DAO.
You can find the report here, and I will be covering the highlights of the report in this post.
Birds eye view
For Q1 2022, Maple generated their highest revenue yet at nearly $2 million. Furthermore, for the first time, Maple Finance was able to turn a positive profit of $226,851, which yields a margin of approximately 12%.
More than $1 billion in total loans have been originated on Maple since the launch of the protocol 10 months ago, indicating Maple indeed is gaining traction. Loan origination increased more than 114% from Q4 2021, which is a lower than the growth from Q3 2021 to Q4 2021 of 184%. Loan origination directly correlates with revenue because of the loan establishment fee, which will be discussed in the next section.
Expenses for the protocol have also been rising, but the increase is to be expected since the project is in their hyper growth stage.
Revenue breakdown
Maple's revenue is generated from a .99% annualized loan establishment fee paid by borrowers. 2/3 of that fee goes to the Maple treasury, while 1/3 goes to the pool delegate that packages the loan.
Nearly 88% of the loan establishment fee revenue came in the form USDC, while 12% of the fee revenue came in the form of WETH.
Expenses
Expenses were generally in line with expectations, though team and recruitment costs came in a bit higher. Two key hires for Maple in Q1 2022 came via recruiting agencies, which is why recruitment costs were higher than expected.
Across the quarter, Maple grew the team by 12, including hiring for essential positions such as Head of Growth, General Counsel, and Head of Engineering.
Team costs were for the quarter high because the platform used to pay team members requires up front deposits, which explains $198,000 of the variance since that was the amount deposited.
One line item that sticks out in terms of size is auditing costs. Maple Finance opted to use Trail of Bits, which is the cream of the crop in terms of auditing firms in crypto. $131,813 for a top notch audit is not out of the ordinary at all.
Upcoming initiatives
Maple has quite a few upcoming initiatives that should excite its community. One of the most anticipated changes is the launch of xMPL, which is inspired by xSUSHI and enables owners of MPL to lock up their tokens to receive a staking reward coming from Maple's treasury.
Another significant move for Maple will be deploying on Solana in the coming weeks.
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