In brief – Decentralized lending platform Morpho has secured $175 million in its latest funding round, highlighting the rise of curated lending vaults. – The platform has been adopted by industry giants like Coinbase and Binance, along with French banking giant Société Générale….
The raise signals persistent demand for DeFi infrastructure, despite an uptick in multi-million dollar exploits this year. Decentralized lending protocol Morpho has secured $175 million in new funding, highlighting persistent demand for DeFi infrastructure despite a series of recent setbacks for the sector
The platform, which allows anyone to create isolated lending markets, billed the raise as one of the largest-ever funding rounds for a DeFi platform in a Tuesday announcement. Previously, Morpho obtained $68 million in financing across two rounds, according to Crunchbase. With $11 billion in user deposits, the protocol has played an outsized role in popularizing curated lending vaults, which resemble funds and allow risk managers to set parameters under which users’ capital is automatically allocated to various crypto-backed markets.
Morpho said the round was co-led by Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)—two of crypto’s largest venture capital firms—alongside Ribbit Capital. Morpho said the raise attracted strategic backing from Apollo Funds, Circle Ventures, and VanEck, with participation from over a dozen other firms. The protocol has been adopted by leading exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance, enabling customers to earn interest on stablecoins such as Circle’s USDC or Tether’s USDT, or take out loans using digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum as collateral.