Why a DeFi platform ditched its consumer app to become the secret backend for tech giants
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- Spark shelved its consumer-facing app "indefinitely," CEO Sam MacPherson said, pivoting from competing with Coinbase and Robinhood to supplying yield and liquidity as a B2B2C backend layer underneath apps consumers already use.
- Robinhood Earn's $200 million vault, launched with roughly 7% APY on USDG deposits, routes funds through a Morpho onchain vault curated by Steakhouse Financial across lending markets that include Ethena's USDe, Maple's syrupUSDG and Spark's spUSDG.
- Spark migrated about $150 million into Uniswap v4 pools pairing USDS against USDT and PYUSD via a hook called DualPool, accounting for roughly 30% of stablecoin-to-stablecoin swap volume on Uniswap and routing about $1.5 billion in its first 30 days.
- PayPal teamed up with Spark last year to boost PYUSD liquidity, part of a fragmenting landscape that includes Robinhood's Global Dollar consortium membership, Stripe and Coinbase backing OpenUSD (OUSD), and issuers like Ethena, World Liberty Financial and Sky launching their own tokens.
- Spark's annual revenue fell from about $80 million during the bull market to roughly $20 million today, but its Bitcoin-backed OTC loans through Anchorage stand at about $260 million outstanding with a $1 billion year-end target.
- Spark Prime, a hybrid prime brokerage combining centralized and onchain services, holds about $20 million in outstanding loans and remains in deliberate beta, while the protocol pursues credit ratings from S&P, Moody's and Credora to clear institutional counterparty checks.
Why it matters: The pivot reframes DeFi value capture: Spark rents yield infrastructure to fintechs rather than competing for users, with Robinhood's $200M Morpho vault as live proof MacPherson expects to reach 'billions.' Hitting the $1B Bitcoin-lending target requires nearly quadrupling outstanding balances in six months while annual revenue sits at $20M — making S&P and Moody's credit ratings the gating factor for institutional scale.
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