Maple Finance has acquired Avari – an undercollateralized lending protocol.

The move will allow Maple to launch on the Solana blockchain, becoming the first corporate credit marketplace to do so.

Sidney Powell, CEO and co-founder of Maple Finance said the focus was on making Maple “the dominant corporate credit infrastructure in crypto by removing all frictions and expanding across multiple chains”.

“The acquisition of the three Avari team members out of Stanford means we can expand to Solana in the first half of 2022, and begin to welcome retail investors and high-quality customers from the Solana ecosystem such as DAOs, protocols and investors to our platform,” he said.

“This provides the potential to add billions of dollars in untapped value to the Maple ecosystem.”

The main intention of this acquisition is, according to the announcement, increasing Maple’s total addressable market (TAM) and growing the potential total value locked (TVL) of the protocol, making Maple the largest undercollateralized lending product by TVL in decentralised finance (DeFi), and building the strongest engineering team on Solana.

Quinn Barry, CEO and co-founder of Avari commented that, by working with Maple, the company would be able to focus on its core competency, the technical development of the product and scale much faster.

“This combination of our engineering team and Maple’s proven track record is the perfect opportunity to build the best undercollateralized lending protocol in DeFi,” he said.

Undercollateralized lending in crypto is still comparatively small, representing less than 1% of the outstanding debt market.

However, this indicates there is a lot of room to grow and expand across DeFi.