Morpho Bags $175M While DeFi Keeps Its Head Above Water 🏦

Decentralized lending protocol Morpho has closed a $175 million funding round, one of the largest ever for a DeFi platform, the project said Tuesday. The raise was co-led by crypto venture firms Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) alongside Ribbit Capital, with strategic participation from Apollo Funds, Circle Ventures and VanEck, plus more than a dozen additional investors.

Morpho had previously raised $68 million across two earlier rounds, according to Crunchbase, and now holds $11 billion in user deposits. The protocol enables anyone to spin up isolated lending markets and has helped popularize curated lending vaults — fund-like structures in which risk managers set parameters for automatically allocating capital to crypto-backed markets.

The platform is already used by major exchanges including Coinbase and Binance, letting customers earn interest on stablecoins such as Circle's USDC or Tether's USDT, or borrow against digital assets including Bitcoin and Ethereum. French banking giant Société Générale is also building on Morpho, the protocol said, framing its ambition as becoming "a shared credit layer that lets banks, asset managers, and fintechs" build programmable lending products.

"The true value of finance has always been held back by dated infrastructure," Morpho co-founder Paul Frambot said in a statement. "We're building the open credit network for the world, connecting those with excess capital to those who need financing, globally." The new capital will be directed toward infrastructure development and commercial integrations with strategic partners, the protocol added.

The raise arrives against a backdrop of stress in DeFi, including a liquidity crisis on Aave triggered by an exploit that hit KelpDAO, and the suspected theft of $285 million from Drift by a North Korean-linked hacking group. Prior to the round, Coinbase used Morpho to revive its Bitcoin-backed lending program early last year, and like other lending protocols, Morpho subjects borrowers to liquidations when collateral values fall below set thresholds.