Investment bank Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Morpho, calling the lending protocol a decentralized finance (DeFi) double play that combines a lending market with infrastructure for onchain banks and asset managers.
The bank has a price target of $60 for MORPHO by the end of 2030, which means about 33x upside to its current price. This would see the token surpass both bitcoin and ether (ETH) in the same period.
MORPHO was more than 13% higher in 24 hours, trading around $2.13 at the time of publication.
“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 believe Morpho can scale to accommodate the growing base of assets deployed in DeFi,” wrote Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, in the Wednesday report.
Decentralized finance has surged over the past year as institutional interest in real-world tokenized assets and onchain lending accelerated. Lending protocols have benefited from rising stablecoin adoption and renewed demand for cryptocredit, while infrastructure providers that enable asset managers and financial institutions to deploy capital on-chain have emerged as one of the sector’s fastest-growing segments.
