Morpho drops 4% despite securing $175M funding led by Paradigm, a16z Crypto

Decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Morpho announced Friday it raised $175 million in a funding round led by Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm (a16z Crypto) and Ribbit Capital.

The funding round also attracted participation from Apollo Funds, Circle Ventures, VanEck, Ledger, Cathay Innovation and a broad group of strategic investors.

The new funding comes as institutional interest in tokenized finance and onchain credit continues to accelerate. Morpho stated that the shift reflects a broader transition from experimentation to real-world adoption, as financial institutions evaluate how onchain infrastructure fits into their long-term product roadmaps.

"As more financial activity moves onchain, the opportunity grows from crypto-native lending toward the much larger global credit market," the protocol noted in a Friday statement.

Morpho added that its mission is to "power human ambition with open access to capital," by building open infrastructure that allows capital to move efficiently across platforms and geographies.

Morpho expands institutional and fintech reach

Beyond the new funding,  Morpho highlighted continued adoption of its lending infrastructure across both crypto-native platforms and traditional finance applications.

The protocol said its technology already powers lending products for Coinbase, Robinhood and Kraken while positioning itself as a neutral infrastructure layer that fintech companies and financial institutions can integrate into their own products.

Rather than interacting directly with DeFi applications, users can access lending, borrowing and yield opportunities through platforms they already use.

Morpho also announced that global payroll platform Deel has joined its network, allowing contractors to earn stablecoin rewards on idle balances.

The rollout will begin in Argentina before expanding to additional markets, illustrating how fintech companies are increasingly embedding blockchain-based financial services into existing products.

The company further noted that discussions with institutional participants have evolved significantly over the past year. During the recent Vault Summit in New York co-hosted with S&P Global, conversations shifted from proof-of-concept experiments toward deploying production-ready onchain financial products, although Morpho acknowledged institutional adoption remains in its early stages.

Standard Chartered sees MORPHO reaching $60 by 2030

The announcement comes just days after Standard Chartered initiated research coverage on Morpho, projecting that its native token could climb to $60 by the end of 2030.

The bank attributed its outlook to Morpho's combination of decentralized lending markets and its Vaults infrastructure for onchain asset management, which it believes gives the protocol multiple avenues for growth.

Standard Chartered expects assets deployed across decentralized finance to increase roughly 37-fold by 2030, creating a significantly larger addressable market for lending infrastructure providers.

Despite the announcement, Morpho's native token is trading at $1.97, down nearly 4% over the past 24 hours at the time of writing.