Morpho Association has raised $175 million in one of DeFi’s largest funding rounds, giving the onchain credit protocol fresh capital as institutional lending markets keep moving closer to blockchain rails.
The round was co-led by Paradigm, a16z crypto and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Apollo Funds, Circle Ventures, VanEck and Ledger Cathay. Variant, Wintermute Ventures, Prelude, IOSG, Hashkey, Mirana, NJJ Capital, SBI Group, Bpifrance and other strategic backers also joined the financing.
The size and investor mix place Morpho in the middle of a broader push to bring credit products, lending infrastructure and institutional balance-sheet activity onchain. Morpho operates an open blockchain-based credit network with more than $11 billion in deposits and says its infrastructure is already used by Bitwise, Galaxy (NASDAQ: $GLXY), Anchorage Digital, Coinbase (NASDAQ: $COIN), Kraken and Binance.
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Morpho is building around a more practical institutional use case: infrastructure that banks, asset managers and fintechs can use to create programmable credit products without rebuilding lending markets from the ground up. Its protocol is designed to connect borrowers and capital providers across separate lending pools, turning fragmented onchain credit activity into a more organized market.
Cofounder Paul Frambot said finance has been held back by “dated infrastructure, fragmented systems, and extractive intermediaries,” adding that Morpho is building an open credit network to connect capital with borrowers globally.
The capital will be used to deepen technical and commercial integrations with strategic partners and continue building infrastructure for programmable credit products. That puts the round in the same lane as the larger tokenization and real-world asset cycle, where institutions are testing whether blockchains can reduce settlement friction and make credit markets more transparent.
Credit remains one of finance’s largest and most fragmented profit pools. Morpho bets that open lending infrastructure can sit underneath that market as more asset managers, exchanges and financial platforms bring tokenized products to users.
The Morpho (CRYPTO: $MORPHO) cryptocurrency is currently trading at $1.82 U.S. per digital token.
