Taking the Long View on Onchain Credit and Curation

At Morpho, we think about onchain credit and curation over multi-year time horizons.

Our ambition is not simply to grow today’s onchain lending market. It is to bring the world’s $200T+ credit market onchain, and curation is essential to getting there.

Traditional finance isn’t served by a handful of institutions. It runs on thousands of banks, lenders and specialist firms, each with deep expertise in particular asset classes, regions and borrowers. Onchain credit will need the same breadth of specialization. To serve credit markets across every asset class, geography, borrower type, and risk profile, the ecosystem will need many curators with the expertise to identify opportunities, underwrite risk, and build financing products on top of shared credit infrastructure.

While curation is still only around two years old, it has already become a fundamental part of onchain finance:

• The curation market has grown from $0 to $11B+
• Leading fintechs including Coinbase, Deel and Robinhood use curator-powered lending products, with some passing $500M in assets within just months of launch
• More than 30 active curators are building on Morpho, from established players such as Steakhouse Financial, Sentora and Gauntlet to new entrants including Galaxy, Bitwise and Wintermute

This is only the beginning. Curation is still nascent, and its growth will scale with the broader expansion of onchain finance. To assume where curation is today is where it will end up in 10 years is simply not ambitious enough about the future of onchain credit.

Morpho’s role is to keep expanding what can be built on open, shared credit infrastructure. Curators’ role is to use that platform to build credit markets and financing products.

As more assets and economic activity move onchain, they create new market types and financing needs. Stablecoins, tokenized securities, private credit, receivables, and future asset classes will each require different underwriting expertise, risk profiles, maturities, and credit products. Curators are the ones who turn these new assets into active credit markets.

With the release of Morpho Midnight, this will grow exponentially. We expect many new and interconnected use cases will emerge on the Morpho stack, originated by a thriving ecosystem of curators and driven by the needs of fintechs and institutions.

The advantage of building on Morpho is that the network effects of the shared infrastructure accrue beyond a single asset class or market. As more markets, assets, lenders, borrowers, and curators join the network, activity increases, liquidity deepens, pricing becomes more efficient, and the opportunities for everyone expand.

These first few years were curation’s 0-to-1. Now we are building for the 1-to-100.