TL;DR: 2026 is shaping up to be the year of vaults. In January alone, Bitwise joined Morpho as a curator, Kraken launched DeFi Earn powered in part by Morpho, and Vaults V2 continued to scale.

We’ve been saying it for a while: vaults are the next layer of infrastructure for asset management. But it’s no longer just us shouting from the rooftops. Bitwise recently echoed the same view, predicting that 2026 vaults would see assets under curation double this year. Even traditional media is beginning to frame vaults as a low-risk, low-cost way for financial institutions to retain users while positioning for deeper participation in digital markets.

Against this backdrop, Morpho is well-positioned for the next phase of adoption. Morpho Vaults are already the most widely used vault standard in the market, providing a proven foundation as demand for institutional-grade, onchain yield continues to accelerate.

Last Monday, Bitwise announced its entry into vault curation.

Bitwise is a global asset manager with more than $15B in assets under management across its ETF and staking products, and a large investment team built for institutional-grade portfolio management.

Its decision to curate vaults on Morpho is an important signal: onchain yield has moved well beyond early adopters, and the providers are now expanding to include institutions with deep experience in traditional markets.

The rationale for institutions to move onchain is straightforward. Tokenized assets and stablecoin balances are growing, and capital needs a venue where it can be deployed efficiently with transparent risk parameters and full operational controls.

Morpho has become a natural choice because it is infrastructure that gives institutions full control over the design of their product, as well as choosing the risk profile that fits their product and client base. Enterprises and capital allocators now have a variety of choices of vaults, curated by a spectrum of DeFi-native curators for those coming from TradFi backgrounds.

This shift is also showing up in mainstream coverage.

Bloomberg framed the appeal of vaults in plain terms in Muyao Shen’s report:

Many vaults are deliberately unexciting: their draw is not outsized returns, but the promise of earning yield on digital cash without surrendering custody or turning users into creditors of a single firm.

Morpho fits cleanly into that story as neutral infrastructure that makes risk explicit and configurable, so curators can offer a range of profiles suitable for different distribution partners.

American Banker echoed the same direction from a banking lens, arguing that vaults can offer managed yield with fewer frictions than traditional structures, while keeping assets onchain and ready to move when markets shift.

Vaults offer users the benefits of managed yield without many of the frictions and risks present in traditional funds. They enable inert stablecoins to earn attractive returns with minimal fuss. And they keep funds in the crypto ecosystem for swift deployment should markets start to move.

Kraken, one of the longest-standing and most trusted crypto institutions, announced DeFi Earn with access to Morpho yield curated by Sentora. For Kraken’s users, the experience is simple and familiar. Under the hood, it connects a large user base to onchain markets through a curated structure. This is the model that keeps repeating across the industry: trusted platforms own the customer experience, while open onchain infrastructure powers the product.

Kraken’s launch also reinforces a broader milestone for Morpho’s universal lending network. Three of the largest regulated exchanges in the US now connect to Morpho. Coinbase demonstrated the blueprint first, Gemini followed, and now Kraken has added its own distribution. This is what enterprise adoption looks like in practice: large platforms adopt onchain rails that are reliable, configurable, and already proven at scale.

In roughly a year, Coinbase crypto-backed loans scaled from 0 to $2B in collateral and $1.1B in active loans (you can track the growth here). More importantly, it showed that users can benefit from onchain transparency and competitive rates without needing to think about gas fees, bridges, or wallet management. The product feels like a standard financial super app, while Morpho does the work behind the scenes.

In just over a year, Coinbase’s crypto-backed loans scaled from zero to $2B in collateral and $1.1B in active loans (track the growth here). More than the raw numbers, the product validated a key thesis: users can benefit from onchain transparency and competitive rates without ever needing to think about gas fees, bridges, or wallet management.

From the user’s perspective, it feels simpler than most financial applications. Under the hood, Morpho powers the onchain lending infrastructure, quietly handling execution while Coinbase owns the distribution and experience.

The Coinbase integration has become a blueprint for the industry, evidenced by the fact that Morpho is now the #1 DeFi protocol by monthly active users thanks to the large-scale distributional channels it is integrated with, as highlighted by Omar from Dragonfly Capital.

Morpho Vaults V2 continues to compound on recent momentum. Total deposits have now exceeded $800M, and liquidity has been steadily migrating into the new standard for curation.

 

Morpho Vaults V2 inherits the same noncustodial properties as V1, while extending flexibility: vaults can now allocate across any current and future versions of Morpho Markets. In practice, this turns Morpho Vaults V2 into a durable, forward-compatible allocation layer. Every new version of the Morpho protocol after Morpho V2 will inherit the network effects and liquidity in the Morpho network.

Beyond solving the cold-start problem, Vaults V2 also comes with advanced risk management, upgraded role-based governance and customizable access controls for institutional-grade compliance needs.

Beyond vaults, tokenized RWAs have quietly emerged as another major driver of growth. Over the past year, RWA deposits on Morpho scaled from roughly $1.5M at the start of 2025 to more than $820M by January 2026.

It’s the same story in a different form: more real-world value is moving onchain, and it needs neutral infrastructure to be deployed efficiently — with transparency, control, and clear risk boundaries. You can track the growth of the specific lending markets on this dashboard.

If January is any indication, the market is converging on a simple conclusion: vaults are becoming the interface where institutions, large-scale enterprises, and capital allocators access onchain yield — one vault at a time.