Investment bank Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Morpho, calling the lending protocol a dual play in decentralized finance (DeFi) that combines a lending marketplace with infrastructure for on-chain banks and asset managers.
The bank has a $60 price target for MORPHO by the end of 2030, which implies approximately 33 times its current price. This would cause the token to outperform Bitcoin. and ether (ETH) during the same period.
MORPHO rose over 13% in 24 hours, trading around $2.13 at press time.
“Given its status as one of the largest DeFi lending protocols and its comfortable financial position (it just raised $175 million in venture capital funding), we believe Morpho can scale to meet the expanding base of assets deployed in DeFi,” Geoff Kendrick wrote. head of digital asset research at Standard Chartered, in Wednesday’s report.
Decentralized finance has rebounded sharply over the past year as institutional interest in real-world tokenized assets and on-chain lending accelerated. Lending protocols have benefited from the growing adoption of stablecoins and renewed demand for crypto credit, while infrastructure providers that enable asset managers and financial institutions to deploy capital on-chain have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the sector.
