Investment bank Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Morpho, calling the credit protocol a dual-play on decentralized finance (DeFi) that combines a credit market with infrastructure for onchain banks and asset managers.
The bank has a price target of €60 $MORPHO by the end of 2030, which represents an increase of approximately 33x from the current price. This would make the token outperform both bitcoin BTC$60,180.98 and ether (ETH) during the same period.
$MORPHO was up over 13% in 24 hours and was trading around $2.13 at the time of publication.
“Given its status as one of the largest DeFi lending protocols and its comfortable financial position (it just raised $175 million in venture capital funding), we believe Morpho can scale to meet the growing base of assets deployed in DeFi,” Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, wrote in the Wednesday report.
Decentralized finance has rebounded strongly over the past year as institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets and onchain lending has increased. Lending protocols have benefited from the increasing adoption of stablecoins and renewed demand for crypto credits, while infrastructure providers that enable asset managers and financial institutions to deploy capital onchain have emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments of the sector.