Standard Chartered Sets $60 Target for MORPHO Token by End of 2030

Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Morpho, assigning a $60 price target for the MORPHO token by the end of 2030. The target implies approximately 33x upside from the token's current trading price of around $2.13, which was up more than 13% over the prior 24 hours at the time of publication. The bank projects MORPHO would outperform both bitcoin and ether over the same period.

The bank's digital assets research head, Geoff Kendrick, described Morpho as a dual-play on decentralized finance, combining a lending market with infrastructure designed to serve onchain banks and asset managers. The report, published Wednesday, cited Morpho's status as one of the largest DeFi lending protocols and its recently strengthened balance sheet as key factors underpinning the bullish outlook.

Morpho operates through two distinct business lines. The first, Morpho Markets, is a lending protocol that has grown to roughly one-quarter the size of Aave by total deposits. The second, Morpho Vaults, provides infrastructure for onchain asset management and banking applications. Kendrick argued this combination gives Morpho a differentiated position as decentralized finance shifts beyond crypto-native lending toward institutional and tokenized assets.

The protocol recently closed a $175 million venture capital funding round. Standard Chartered said the proceeds provide a comfortable financial position to support the scaling necessary to capture growth across both business lines. 'Given its status as one of the largest DeFi lending protocols and its comfortable financial position, we think Morpho can scale to meet the expanding base of assets deployed in DeFi,' Kendrick wrote.

Standard Chartered's broader DeFi outlook underpins the Morpho price target. The bank forecasts total DeFi assets will expand 37-fold by the end of 2030, and expects Morpho's assets under deployment to grow broadly in line with that trajectory. The forecast is supported by accelerating institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets and onchain lending, along with rising stablecoin adoption and renewed demand for crypto credit.

The bank flagged Morpho's Vaults business as the primary driver of long-term growth, noting that attracting institutional capital and traditional financial assets onchain will be critical. Building deeper relationships across traditional finance represents a significant opportunity, Standard Chartered said, particularly as tokenization of real-world assets continues to accelerate. However, the bank acknowledged that execution on the institutional side remains the key variable for the protocol's longer-term trajectory.

Standard Chartered has previously issued coverage on other DeFi protocols. In a separate report, the bank projected Aave could reach $3,500 by 2030, also citing the DeFi revival as a catalyst. The initiation of Morpho coverage extends the bank's growing focus on decentralized finance as an investable institutional asset class.