Investment bank Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Morpho, calling the lending protocol a double play on decentralized finance (DeFi) combining a lending marketplace with infrastructure for on-chain banks and asset managers.
The bank has a price target of $60 for MORPHO by the end of 2030, implying an upside of approximately 33 times from its current price. This would see the token outperform both bitcoin and ether (ETH) over the same period.
MORPHO was up more than 13% over 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 funding), we believe Morpho can scale to the growing base of assets deployed in DeFi,” wrote Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, in Wednesday’s report.
Decentralized finance has rebounded strongly over the past year as institutional interest in real-world tokenized assets and on-chain lending has accelerated. Lending protocols have benefited from growing stablecoin adoption 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 in the industry.
