Standard Chartered initiates coverage on Morpho with $60 target
VC & Fundraising ·
The bank's equity research desk becomes one of the first traditional finance analysts to formally rate the DeFi lending protocol, setting a $60 price target.
Standard Chartered's initiation places Morpho under conventional equity-style analyst coverage, a step that signals growing institutional treatment of the protocol as a tracked asset rather than a purely crypto-native project. The $60 price target arrives shortly after Morpho closed a $175 million funding round led by Paradigm and a16z, with participation from major institutional and crypto VCs, according to zoomerfiednews.
The Series B round, also backed by Ribbit Capital, valued Morpho at $2 billion and is aimed at expanding the protocol into institutional lending markets, as reported by Fortune. The raise has been described separately as an effort to bring DeFi lending mainstream, with coverage of the deal appearing across multiple outlets including WuBlockchain and The Block.
The funding and the new analyst coverage follow a broader shift among DeFi lending protocols toward modular risk isolation architectures designed to support institutional-grade onchain credit products. That structural direction is central to why Morpho's backers and now a bank equity desk are positioning it for expansion beyond retail-driven DeFi activity, though the specific mechanics linking the architecture to the price target have not been detailed in available material.
Coverage of the round has been distributed widely, with the cluster reflecting reporting from 7 distinct sources, underscoring the scale of attention the raise and subsequent valuation have drawn. Round-level financial data referenced in industry trackers, including icoanalytics.orgDeFi), further corroborates the scale of the financing.
What remains unclear is the basis Standard Chartered used to arrive at the $60 target, including which metrics, timeframe, or comparables the bank applied. It is also not yet known how the newly raised $175 million will be deployed toward institutional lending markets, or how quickly Morpho's modular risk isolation approach will be adopted relative to competing protocols pursuing similar architectures. Further detail on the bank's methodology and Morpho's institutional rollout plans is expected to clarify how the price target and the funding round connect.