by Morpho 2026
Four years of building Morpho have compounded into one clear approach. Here’s how we are thinking about 2026 and where we are headed:
We started 2025 by powering Coinbase’s crypto-backed loans, which remains, to this day, the largest integration we’ve seen in DeFi. From there, we saw a steady stream of integrations with exchanges, fintechs, and the first banks and regulated institutions, including crypto.com, Gemini, Société Générale Forge, Bitget, and many others.
Morpho usage grew from 67,000 users to 1,4M+ users, deposits grew from $5B all the way to $13B, active loans reached $4,5B. Total deposits of RWA on Morpho have grown from nearly zero at the beginning of 2025 to $400M at the end of Q3 2025. In many ways this was our best year yet.
I spent a lot of time talking with institutions around the world to explain DeFi, dig into how their systems actually work, and try to understand what would need to happen for onchain lending to scale beyond crypto-native users. Two things stood out clearly:
- Institutions are much further along than people think. Most large players today already have DeFi teams, active research, and real interest. In 2026, we will see that interest turn into concrete adoption.
- Onchain lending will not scale as a single, monolithic product. Institutions want flexibility and direct control over how risk, liquidity, fees, rates, and other parameters are expressed and set.
What 2025 taught us about onchain lending
After four years in DeFi, it became clear that for Morpho to matter at scale, it must fully embrace its role as infrastructure.
When institutions engage seriously, what they ask for is control. Control over risk, liquidity, code, and increasingly, pricing. There is no one-size-fits-all loan structure for the entire world. Different balance sheets, jurisdictions, and trust assumptions require different market designs, which is what bigger players are looking for.
Morpho is built for this reality with composable, isolated markets and strategies that can be tailored across a wide range of risk and compliance profiles—allowing depositors to control their exposure precisely.
As a result, much of what matters operationally is already externalized and ready to be used and scaled by large institutions.
The last piece of the puzzle is rate pricing. For most of DeFi’s history, rates in onchain lending were largely driven by formulas embedded in protocols. That made sense early on, when participants were passive, gas was expensive, and liquidity was thin. But as DeFi matures, this is limiting. At scale, pricing cannot be imposed. It has to be discovered.
Institutions don’t want to inherit a rate determined by someone else’s assumptions. They want to express views on risk and return directly. As long as pricing stays internal and formula-driven, onchain lending hits a ceiling.
This is the gap we’re focused on closing next with Morpho V2.
Morpho V2
We’ve spent more than a year building V2. It has been the main focus of the company and will be one of our core execution priorities in 2026.
V2 changes how lending markets are formed. Instead of the protocol deciding rates, the market does. Risk was externalized with V1, now pricing becomes externalized as well.
Morpho V2 unlocks the full potential of DeFi lending as it was always meant to work:
- where rates are set by the market, not the protocol
- where liquidity does not ever fragment because it is offered, not allocated
- where cross-chain loans becomes straightforward
- where users can choose between fixed and passive variable rates
- where central control of markets become largely unnecessary
- where any type of loan structure or intent can be competitively priced
Most importantly, it lets participants express trust and risk in their own terms.
Because of this, Morpho V2 will feel much closer to the market structures and instruments institutions already use offchain. It makes onchain lending easier to reason about, and easier to adopt.
Looking ahead: building the universal lending network
Looking into 2026, our objectives are clear.
2025 was a year of learning and consistent execution. It clarified the key bottlenecks to scaling onchain lending and where Morpho needs to focus to matter in the long term.
In 2026, our focus is on unlocking the full potential of onchain loans, opening up what onchain lending can become when markets are free to form.
Much like Morpho V1—which introduced the curator model and reshaped how onchain lending is structured today—this next step toward V2 will radically expand what’s possible by giving markets and curators more freedom than ever.
We’ll continue making the Morpho onchain lending model broadly useful, not just for crypto-native teams, but for all asset curators, distributors, and fintechs using it as the foundation of their stack.
We will also be scaling our team. Over the past year, we’ve consistently hired top talents across the organization, and we’re not stopping. We plan to continue expanding our engineering, growth, and protocol teams to keep delivering S-tier products.
More broadly, 2026 is the year when Morpho starts extending beyond crypto and into the wider financial landscape. When Morpho becomes even less visible to end users, and more embedded in the everyday products they already use.
2025 was the launchpad that allowed us to become a recognized player in DeFi, but 2026 will truly be the most exciting year yet. We already have serious integrators joining, and we look forward to announcing more over the coming year.
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