$160M Yield Product Pulled: Did Core DAO Just Cripple Maple Finance?

Welcome to this week's edition of the BitcoinYield newsletter. This week, A product we reviewed just 2 weeks ago is sued by Core DAO and secured an injunction, forcing them to pull a $160 million product. Full story below.

This week, we've condensed our strategies to help you find the best yield faster. Instead of cluttering your feed with every token variant (like tBTC and wBTC), we've simplified the YieldBasis metric to show the single highest yield available that day at a glance. We've published a new graphic on our X account showcasing the top 3 strategies today. For real-time, granular data—and to see exactly which option is currently yielding the most $YB tokens—head to the BitcoinYield website.

Maple Finance is currently navigating a legal battle after the Core Foundation secured a court injunction against them in the Cayman Islands.

Core Foundation alleges that Maple Finance breached their commercial agreement and misused confidential information to build a competing product, syrupBTC, after securing over $150m in client BTC through the partnership. Core claims this violated a 24-month exclusivity clause and that Maple's pivot was catalyzed by the success of the Core-powered product.

Maple Finance has issued a strong response, "rejecting these statements in the strongest terms." They deny using any confidential information, stating syrupBTC was built independently. Maple explains that the Bitcoin Yield program was fully hedged against CORE token price risk, but Core's legal actions have prevented them from selling CORE tokens to preserve principal as the token's value declined.

Maple emphasizes that the Bitcoin Yield program is fully ring-fenced from their other operations (like syrupUSDC) and that they are pursuing legal claims to enforce the hedging agreement.

Maple plans to return 85% of BTC principal to lenders shortly, with the remaining 15% tied up in the ongoing legal dispute. We will continue to monitor this situation closely, particularly regarding the "potential impairment" of assets and the outcome of the arbitration.

We're sitting down with two founders who are at the forefront of Bitcoin DeFi. These should be jam-packed episodes. If you have questions you want us to ask, reply to this email.

Alexei Zamyatin, Co-founder of BOB (Build on Bitcoin): Coming off their TGE last week, we plan to dive deep with Alexei on the institutional DeFi roadmap for BOB. We'll be asking what yield products they view as the next generation, creating safer yield products with BItVM, and how they plan to bridge the gap for large-scale institutional adoption.

Evgeny Gohkberg, CEO of Re7 Labs: Evgeny's team curates the top Bitcoin vault and trading strategies being used by major projects like Starknet and Mezo. Join us to uncover the secret sauce behind the most successful on-chain Bitcoin yield products today and how to cap downside risk..