Standard Chartered Sees Morpho Emerging as Key DeFi Infrastructure Player

Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Morpho with a $60 price target for end-2030, arguing that its DeFi lending and onchain infrastructure segments are well placed to benefit from the expansion of tokenized assets.

Investment bank Standard Chartered has begun coverage of Morpho, describing the protocol as a dual-pronged DeFi play that combines a lending marketplace with infrastructure designed for onchain banks and asset managers.

The bank set a $60 price target for MORPHO by 2030, implying roughly 33x upside from current levels and suggesting it could outperform both bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) over that horizon.

At the time of publication, MORPHO was up more than 13% in the past 24 hours, trading near $2.13.

“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, Standard Chartered’s head of digital assets research, in a Wednesday report.

Decentralized finance has strengthened over the past year, driven by rising institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets and increased onchain lending activity. Growth in stablecoin usage and renewed demand for crypto credit have supported lending protocols, while infrastructure providers enabling institutional capital deployment onchain have become one of the fastest-growing areas in the sector.

Kendrick said Morpho operates across two core segments: Morpho Markets, a lending protocol that has reached around one-quarter the size of Aave by deposits, and Morpho Vaults, which provides infrastructure for onchain asset management and banking use cases.

He added that this structure positions Morpho uniquely as DeFi shifts from crypto-native lending toward institutional-grade and tokenized asset markets.

Standard Chartered expects assets on Morpho to grow broadly in line with its projection of a 37-fold expansion in total DeFi assets by 2030, supported by the protocol’s strong balance sheet following its $175 million funding round.

The bank noted that Morpho’s long-term trajectory will depend heavily on the success of its Vaults business in attracting institutional capital and traditional financial assets onchain. While deeper integration with traditional finance will be challenging, it also represents a major opportunity as tokenization gains momentum.