In June this year Morpho, the open blockchain-based credit network, announced that it had raised $175m, which it said was the largest in decentralized finance (DeFi) to date.

The funding round was co-led by venture capitalists Paradigm, a16z crypto, and Ribbit, with strategic participation from Apollo Funds, Circle Ventures, VanEck and Ledger Cathay, alongside other strategic partners.

Despite its scale, Morpho said credit has remained one of the most structurally inefficient parts of finance. Morpho aims to provide banks, asset managers, and fintechs with a backend that unifies them on a single, shared, open network giving their users access to credit products with the best possible terms.

Dennis Bree, head of institutional sales at Morpho, told Markets Media that the current financial system is broken with access to capital depending on who you are, where you live, and whether you have trust from intermediaries. He added: “Morpho is aligned on becoming the open credit network for the world.”

Morpho wants to quicken its go-to-market strategy and partnerships leading financial institutions. Bree said the capital raised will help both of these initiatives to be accelerated.

In a blog Morpho said that its ambition is to bring all $200 trillion of the world’s credit onchain, so it needs to build the necessary infrastructure. Bree said moving capital into that new infrastructure requires a large amount of effort, energy, and resources.

“This raise is rare in terms of the current market for DeFi, but it’s a good signal for the level of enthusiasm in the market,” he added.

Guy Wuollet, general partner at the a16z crypto investment team, said in a blog that an open credit network built on blockchain could lower infrastructure costs, create a more competitive marketplace for credit, and provide greater access to capital and yield. 

Banks and financial institutions can access onchain credit using their own risk parameters and strategies that align with their investment mandates. Paul Frambot, co-founder and chief executive of Morpho, said in a blog that until the internet, information was hard to access.

Frambot said capital has been waiting for a similar shift, which is now possible using blockchain technology to build open credit infrastructure in systems where creditworthiness is expressed transparently and trust can flow freely. He described Morpho as the internet protocol for financing where borrowers express why they should be trusted and lenders compete to offer the best terms.

“Morpho does not replace banks, asset managers, or fintechs,” he added. “It is a shared infrastructure that they build on and connect through. Invisible to most, but powering all financial products and guaranteeing users the best possible terms globally.”

In 2024 Morpho launched Morpho Blue, a permissionless lending protocol. Wuollet  said it was structured similarly to repo and money markets, with floating rate variable term loans overcollateralized with crypto tokens, as has been typical of most onchain lending to date.

Morpho now has more than $11bn in deposits from institutional clients, including Bitwise, Galaxy, and Anchorage Digital, some of the largest crypto exchanges and well-known crypto brands.

Frankie, general partner at Paradigm, said in a statement that Morpho’s open infrastructure is transforming siloed lending products into a single connected market. Frankie said: “In the years to come, every bank, asset manager, and pension fund will want exposure to onchain credit markets.”

The internet's value didn't come from the protocol itself.

It came from the companies : Amazon, Google, Stripe, etc, that used it as a foundation to build applications that delivered value to end-users.

Blockchains are a platform. And the apps are starting to show up.

Credit… https://t.co/Ei1baLV8wS

— VanEck (@vaneck_us) June 9, 2026

VanEck said: “Credit is one of the biggest ones. Fundamentally, there’s no reason it can’t run on the same rails that people globally communicate through.

$5 trillion moves through global credit markets daily, through infrastructure that hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades. It’s intermediary-heavy and exclusive by design.

@Morpho is one of the clearest signals we’ve seen that this is real. An internet protocol can orchestrate billions of capital to deliver savings and credit instruments to millions of users around the world.

Through every cycle, adoption has only ever gone in one direction.

That’s why we participated in Morpho’s latest fundraise.”

Fixed rate lending

Morpho is launching Morpho Midnight, a fixed-rate, fixed-term lending protocol for collateralized credit. Wuollet said this moves Morpho beyond fully collateralized lending for crypto tokens to becoming the open credit network for the internet. 

“The new protocol provides the opportunity for onchain term lending at fixed rates against traditional assets, with the tooling to support customizable KYC [know your customer],” added Woollen. “Importantly, Morpho can also enable customers to launch their own lending markets, and still benefit from the liquidity and network effects of the underlying Morpho credit network.”

Bree said Morpho Blue did a good job solving for liquidity, but institutions want predictability, so the new protocol allows credit to be offered at a fixed rate for a fixed term. Midnight is in its early stages and Bree said it is likely to come to market in the third quarter of this year.

“We already have a number of institutions and large fintechs using Morpho but we think this will accelerate adoption,’ added Bree.

Bree was recently on a call with 25 bankers from one of the largest banks in the US to talk about Morpho Midnight, and they asked a lot of interesting questions. He said they could see some of the parallels between traditional finance and Morpho.

In addition to the launch of Morpho Midnight, Bree said Morpho is “pretty excited” about the tokenization of real world assets which can be used as collateral in the protocol.

“There are up to 128 different collateral templates,” said Bree. “Those two things coming together will give institutions the best way to bring their off-chain lending networks to customers on Morpho.”

Morpho Blue and Midnight enable strong utility for tokenized assets, so Bree believes Morpho’s job is bring together different participants in the ecosystem so they all play a role.

Institutional adoption

In February this year Morpho was integrated into Taurus-PROTECT, a digital asset custody and servicing technology solution for more than 40 financial institutions across four continents. Bree said this integration has been important for onboarding institutions but expects banks to take another two to three years.

“We are very much in this phase of institutions understanding how Morpho relates to their own internal risk structure,” added Bree.

In February this year Morpho said it had entered into a cooperation agreement with alternatives manager Apollo Global Management and they will work together to support onchain lending markets on Morpho’s protocol. A range of different credit instruments, including private credit, are being brought to Morpho according to Bree.

Congrats to the @Morpho team on the $175m fundraise! Morpho isn't just a crypto lending protocol, it's a much bigger idea

Already, the onboarding of RWAs as collateral are providing yield opportunities uncorrelated with the bear market

For instance, @3f_xyz built on Morpho, is… pic.twitter.com/2qm5mDWDKq

— Sonya Kim (@sonyasunkim) June 9, 2026

OxResarch, a newsletter from Blockworks, said Coinbase launched borrowing against bitcoin in January 2025 using Morpho as the underlying lending infrastructure. Coinbase expanded the relationship by launching a USDC yield product powered by Morpho vaults curated by Steakhouse Financial. The newsletter said the impact of this partnership is difficult to overstate as Morpho has secured access to one of the largest retail distribution channels in crypto.

“Morpho is increasingly evolving from a DeFi lending protocol into lending infrastructure that institutions and fintech platforms can build on top of,” said OxResearch.