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

Summary

• Standard Chartered said Morpho combines a DeFi lending protocol with infrastructure powering onchain banks and asset managers.
• The bank expects Morpho's assets to grow in line with its forecast for a 37x expansion in DeFi assets by 2030.
• It initiated coverage of Morpho with a $60 end-2030 price target, implying roughly 33x upside from current levels.

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 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.