The Grand Court of the Cayman Islands granted Core Foundation’s injunction against cryptocurrency lending platform Maple Finance on Wednesday due to alleged violations of their commercial agreement.
Pending arbitration, this injunction prevents Maple from introducing a rival bitcoin yield product and limits its interactions with Core’s native cryptocurrency.
Core and Maple’s history
The foundation and Maple partnered in early 2025 to create lstBTC, a product that would enable investors to earn a return on their bitcoin while keeping them in custody, according to Core’s Wednesday post on X(Twitter). In February, Core and Maple announced their collaboration during a Hong Kong event.
“Core Foundation made significant financial and resource-intensive investments in the technical development, marketing, promotion, and subsidies of the product,” Core said in the post, adding that the bitcoin yield product’s success from its launch in April led to “explosive growth” for Maple.
According to Core, Maple started abusing the foundation’s proprietary data and work product in the middle of 2025 in order to create syrupBTC, a competing product, while still taking Core’s money and resources. According to Core, this behaviour was against the 24-month exclusivity clause.
Maple Finance responded by claiming that Core Foundation’s actions are contrary to lenders’ interests and that its larger business operations continue to run smoothly.
The case ahead
According to a court document, Honourable Justice Jalil Asif KC of the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands determined that Maple’s alleged abuse of sensitive material and violation of the exclusivity agreement constituted a “serious issue to be tried.”
“The Court found damages would not be an adequate remedy because of (i) the risk of Maple dealing in or shedding CORE tokens and (ii) the head-start Maple would gain by launching a competing product,” Core said.
Additionally, once Core stopped making some price-protection payments in response to the alleged breaches, the Core Foundation accused Maple of creating lender risk by declaring impairments on millions of dollars’ worth of deposited bitcoin.
According to Maple, their Bitcoin Yield offering requires them to report an impairment worth millions of dollars against Bitcoin lenders. It’s unclear if Maple has the authority to impair the Bitcoins or why they insist that they can’t release them to their lenders right now. As previously said, they were aware that the Bitcoin was kept by trustworthy custodians.
This is yet another instance of Maple’s troubling actions and commercial practices, which prompted the Core Foundation to act in the community’s best interests.
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