Morpho poised to scale as DeFi infrastructure play, Standard Chartered says

Investment bank Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Morpho, calling the lending protocol a dual-play on decentralized finance (DeFi) that combines a lending market with infrastructure for onchain banks and asset managers.

The bank has a $60 price target for $MORPHO by the end of 2030, implying roughly 33x upside from its current price. This would see the token outperform both bitcoin BTC$60,180.98 and ether (ETH) over the same period.

$MORPHO was more than 13% higher over 24 hours, trading around $2.13 at publication time.

"Given its status as one of the largest DeFi lending protocols and its comfortable financial position (it just raised $175 million in VC funding), we think Morpho can scale to meet the expanding base of assets deployed in DeFi," wrote Geoff Kendrick,head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, in the Wednesday report.

Decentralized finance has rebounded sharply over the past year as institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets and onchain lending accelerated. Lending protocols have benefited from rising stablecoin adoption and renewed demand for crypto credit, while infrastructure providers that enable asset managers and financial institutions to deploy capital onchain have emerged as one of the sector's fastest-growing segments.

Kendrick noted that Morpho operates through two businesses: Morpho Markets, a lending protocol that has grown to roughly one-quarter the size of Aave by deposits, and Morpho Vaults, which provides the infrastructure for on-chain asset management and banking applications.

He argued that the combination gives Morpho a differentiated position as DeFi evolves beyond crypto-native lending toward institutional and tokenized assets.

The bank expects assets deployed on Morpho to expand broadly in line with its forecast for 37-fold growth in total DeFi assets by the end of 2030, supported by the protocol's strong balance sheet following a $175 million venture funding round.

Morpho's long-term growth will depend on the success of its Vaults business in attracting institutional capital and traditional financial assets onchain. Building deeper relationships across traditional finance will be critical, the bank said, but represents a significant opportunity as tokenization accelerates.

Read more: Aave could soar to $3,500 by 2030 on DeFi revival, says StanChart