SECURITY REPORTS

But how does Maple make money then? Maple makes money via its treasury which receives half of the establishment fee paid by borrowers.[4]
How Maple makes money: The Maple treasury receives 50% of establishment fees paid by borrowers.[4]
“While lending has been a breakout sector in DeFi, Aave and Compound do not extend credit because they require all loans to be over-collateralized. This approach has kept these platforms solvent, but it’s highly inefficient and has precluded the fundamental features of credit markets like trust and reputation…We built a decentralized credit market because we believe that DeFi is a transformative industry that will require credit to grow.”[2]
The Maple ecosystem consists of 3 main participants:

Borrowers: Can avoid liquidations or margin calls by leveraging their reputations to borrow under-collateralised loans. Borrowers are established crypto businesses, exchanges or institutions.[5] Liquidity Providers (‘LPs’): Can earn yield by lending to established borrowers in the crypto sector. They fund liquidity pools which are used by borrowers when granted a loan. This is a set-and-forget solution, as the due diligence of the pools is performed by the pool delegates.[6] Providing USDC, locking up for 6 months, to go through 2 cycles. Pool Delegates: Participants who access the borrowers and manage liquidity pools on Maple—each pool is managed by a single Pool Delegate. They run an underwriting system to determine the credit worthiness of borrowers, setting interest rates, loan values and payment terms based on a borrower’s profile, similar to traditional banking (credit approval).[7] Pool delegates are white-listed, and need to have expertise, strong reputation and strong relationships. Pool delegates are likely to be funds or industry professionals. For performing this work, they earn a %of an establishment fee—paid by borrowers—and a % of the interest earned by the liquidity pool. They’re also required to stake in the liquidity pool by putting down MPL and USDC to provide a reserve.
maple2 Maple Protocol overview[4] Token The Maple Token (‘MPL’) is an ERC-20 token.[8] As of this writing, 1.13M are in circulation of the 10M maximum supply.[9] This is a very early stage project, with a market cap of ~US$12M.
MPL has 4 core functions:
Governance: Enables holders to participate in governance via the DAO, by submitting and voting on proposed changes to the protocol, such as fee levels and treasury management. Holders who don’t want to participate can delegate their vote. Whilst the project is nascent, governance is informal (e.g. polls via Discord) and not on-chain.[10] Fees: Holders share in fee revenues by depositing Balancer Pool Tokens (‘BPTs’) into a pool of their choice, providing a credit-risk buffer for LPs. In turn, holders earn 10% of the interest from pools when MPL is staked. [10–11] (Staking is not necessary for MPL holders to earn their share of the establishment fee.) Staking: MPL is staked by holders to provide a reserve of capital to a liquidity pool of their choice, in exchange for yield. Pool Delegates and MPL holders stake by depositing a combination of MPL and stablecoins into a MPL:USDC Balancer pool, which gives the user BPTs.[12] Rewards: Liquidity mining rewards paid in MPL.[13] MPL is distributed as follows: treasury (14%), seed investors (26%), public auction (5%), liquidity mining (30%), and Team and advisors (25%).[10]