Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Morpho with a $60 price target for end-2030, saying its DeFi lending and onchain infrastructure businesses are well positioned to benefit from the expansion of tokenized assets.

The bank described Morpho as a dual-pronged DeFi protocol, combining a lending marketplace with infrastructure designed for onchain banks and institutional asset managers.

It set a $60 target for MORPHO by 2030, implying roughly 33x upside from current levels and suggesting potential outperformance versus bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) over the period.

MORPHO was up more than 13% on the day, trading near $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 VC funding), we think Morpho can scale to meet the expanding base of assets deployed in DeFi,” wrote Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, in a Wednesday report.

Decentralized finance has gained momentum over the past year, driven by rising institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets and increased onchain lending activity. Growth in stablecoin adoption and renewed demand for crypto credit have supported lending protocols, while infrastructure providers enabling institutional capital deployment onchain have become one of the fastest-growing segments in the space.

Kendrick noted that Morpho operates through two main segments: Morpho Markets, a lending protocol that has grown to roughly one-quarter the size of Aave by deposits, and Morpho Vaults, which provides infrastructure for onchain asset management and banking applications.

He said this dual structure positions Morpho to benefit as DeFi evolves from crypto-native lending toward institutional and tokenized asset use cases.

Standard Chartered expects assets on Morpho to grow broadly in line with its forecast for a 37x expansion in total DeFi assets by 2030, supported by the protocol’s strengthened balance sheet following its $175 million funding round.

The bank added that Morpho’s long-term outlook will depend heavily on the success of its Vaults business in attracting institutional capital and traditional financial assets onchain. While integration with traditional finance remains challenging, it also represents a major growth opportunity as tokenization continues to accelerate.