Morpho is quietly rewriting the way millions of people interact with their money not by building a new app with flashy charts, but by becoming the engine that powers the financial tools they already use. The so‑called “DeFi mullet” makes this possible: a familiar front‑end at the surface and a decentralized protocol running under the hood. Over the past year that concept leaped from theory to practice as Morpho embedded its non‑custodial lending network into some of the world’s most popular wallets, exchanges and fintech platforms. Collectively these partnerships have introduced on‑chain yield and credit to everyday people in the United States, Europe, Latin America and across the global south. They have also proved that decentralized lending can scale without sacrificing simplicity or safety.
The story begins with Coinbase, one of the first major platforms to embrace the DeFi mullet in earnest. Early in 2025 Coinbase launched crypto‑backed loans powered by Morpho that let users borrow USDC against their Bitcoin holdings. Within months this product had attracted more than half a billion dollars in active loans and over a billion dollars in collateral. The experience was seamless: borrowers tapped a few buttons in the Coinbase app, chose their loan size and term, and received USDC without ever leaving the Coinbase ecosystem. They could repay at any time or top up their collateral if the price of BTC moved against them. Under the hood Morpho tracked the collateral, managed interest accrual and executed liquidations when necessary, but none of those complexities surfaced to the end user. The success of the loan product laid the groundwork for Coinbase’s subsequent launch of USDC savings, which routes customer deposits into Morpho vaults curated by professional risk managers. Depositors earn competitive yields and can withdraw instantly; borrowers get access to deep liquidity at market‑based rates. Together, Coinbase Loans and Coinbase Earn form a complete lending and borrowing loop: borrowers pay interest and depositors earn it, with Morpho handling the mechanics and Coinbase providing the familiar interface.
While Coinbase brought Morpho to the U.S. masses, Europe’s gateway arrived via Gemini and Bitpanda. Gemini’s non‑custodial wallet serves millions of users and had long been a gateway to buying and storing crypto. To meet rising demand for on‑chain yield, the exchange built Gemini Invest on Arbitrum and plugged directly into Morpho vaults. Users simply deposit USDC or USDT in the Gemini Wallet, select “earn” and watch their balance grow; yields come from lending markets on Morpho, and all positions are transparent on Arbscan. Gemini retains full control over the user experience while offloading the complexity of interest accounting, risk management and liquidations to Morpho. Bitpanda, a regulated European exchange with millions of customers, followed a similar path. When it launched its DeFi Wallet in 2025 it wanted to offer savings rates higher than the two percent available in most European banks. Rather than build its own lending system, Bitpanda used Morpho’s embedded earn solution. The exchange could choose which vaults to integrate, brand the product in its own design language and even abstract away seed phrases through account‑abstraction logins. On day one Bitpanda’s users gained access to deep liquidity across Morpho’s ecosystem and earned yield generated by blue‑chip vaults curated by Steakhouse Financial and Gauntlet. All positions are verifiable on chain, giving regulators and customers confidence that funds are never re‑hypothecated. By Q3 2025 Bitpanda’s DeFi Wallet had become one of the largest regulated fintech integrations of DeFi infrastructure in Europe.
Self‑custody wallets have also embraced Morpho to transform idle balances into productive assets. Trust Wallet, with hundreds of millions of users worldwide, introduced a Stablecoin Earn feature powered by Morpho in early 2025. The challenge for Trust Wallet was to offer yield without compromising its non‑custodial ethos or confusing users with complex DeFi steps. Morpho’s vaults provided the answer. When a Trust Wallet user toggles Earn, their USDC or USDT flows into selected Morpho vaults where it is lent to borrowers around the world. In the background Steakhouse and Gauntlet allocate capital across markets and manage risk; the user retains full control over their keys and can withdraw at any time. Within a week of launch Trust Wallet users deposited tens of millions of dollars, and by the end of the first month deposits surpassed fifty million. The response was so strong that Morpho vaults became the default yield engine across Trust Wallet’s Earn hub. Ledger, the leading hardware wallet provider with more than eight million devices sold, faced a similar dilemma. Its companion app, Ledger Wallet (formerly Ledger Live), offered buying, selling and staking but lacked a native DeFi earn feature. By integrating Morpho via Kiln’s enterprise‑grade DeFi module, Ledger introduced USDC and USDT earning options without relying on centralized lending desks. Users can deposit stablecoins and watch their balance accrue interest in real time; Ledger keeps its self‑custodial security model intact and plans to expand to additional vaults and assets. In less than half a year more than a hundred million dollars in deposits flowed through Ledger’s Morpho integration, turning the once‑passive hardware wallet into an active personal finance hub.
The DeFi mullet has found fertile ground in emerging markets where stablecoins double as both savings vehicles and daily spending money. Argentina’s Lemon Cash exemplifies this trend. Inflation in Argentina routinely exceeds triple digits, making dollar‑denominated stablecoins a lifeline for preserving value. Lemon’s app already let users buy USDC and use a Mastercard‑powered debit card for day‑to‑day purchases. The missing piece was a simple way to earn on the balances that users tended to hold. Lemon launched Lemon Earn by plugging into Morpho vaults, delivering a yield higher than most local bank accounts. More than seventy thousand unique depositors have used the product, collectively depositing over sixteen million dollars – the majority of which sits in stablecoins. Most individual positions are modest, often just a few hundred dollars, but the aggregate effect shows that micro‑savers can have macro‑impact when a product is accessible and transparent. Lemon’s integration also highlights how DeFi mullet partnerships distribute risk: Lemon’s customers supply liquidity, while borrowers on other platforms like Coinbase Loans create demand. Morpho’s global matching engine ensures that an idle dollar in Buenos Aires can finance a loan to a trader in New York or a business in Asia, with both sides benefiting from a market‑based rate.
The most ambitious of Morpho’s deployments is on World Chain, a blockchain built around identity verification through World ID. More than twenty‑five million users of the World App can now access a Morpho mini app developed by Paperclip Labs. With a few taps, a user can deposit WLD, WETH, USDC.e or WBTC into Morpho vaults or borrow against their holdings – all without switching networks or managing seed phrases. This is one of the largest rollouts of self‑custodial DeFi ever delivered to retail users, and it includes unique incentives: a five‑million‑dollar rewards program, part of which is hyper‑targeted to verified humans rather than bots. The World integration also introduces a human‑first gas policy that gives verified users a generous gas allowance, making micro‑lending practical for the first time. Because World ID proves the user is unique without revealing their identity, developers can start exploring under‑collateralised credit and reputation‑based lending circles on Morpho markets. For people in Manila or Buenos Aires, it means that even a five‑dollar balance can earn yield or secure a small loan. For developers and researchers, it opens a laboratory for experimenting with credit models that were previously impossible in permissionless DeFi.
Behind these headline integrations lies a surge of activity across Morpho’s core network. By mid‑2025 total deposits on Morpho surpassed nine billion dollars, and within a couple of months that figure crossed the ten‑billion‑dollar mark, eventually reaching twelve billion by the end of summer. Much of this growth came from new chain deployments: Morpho launched its infrastructure on Arbitrum, Unichain, Hyperliquid, Katana and even Telegram, capturing users who might never interact with a standalone DeFi app. On Arbitrum, campaigns like DRIP attracted new depositors, while on Hyperliquid more than six hundred million dollars flowed into vaults to support perpetual trading markets. Katana’s DeFi flywheel spun up quickly, gathering half a billion in deposits within three months. Morpho on Base remained the largest instance across any Ethereum layer‑2 with more than two billion dollars in deposits and market share representing nearly half of the circulating cbBTC supply. These numbers matter because they reflect both the increasing trust in Morpho’s infrastructure and the network effects of the DeFi mullet: as more partners join, the lending pool deepens, rates become more competitive and the user experience becomes smoother.
Partnerships have also spurred a wave of product innovation on the Morpho app itself. To support borrowers who want to actively manage risk and leverage, the app rolled out one‑click tools like Multiply and Repay with Collateral. Multiply allows a user to borrow against their collateral and immediately convert the loan back into more collateral in a single transaction, effectively looping the position without manual steps. Repay with Collateral lets a borrower close part or all of a loan using their collateral instead of sourcing the borrowed asset. Swap functionality, powered by Velora (formerly ParaSwap), is integrated directly into the borrowing flow so users can adjust their positions without leaving Morpho. These tools flatten the learning curve for newcomers and empower experienced traders alike. On the back end Morpho launched pre‑liquidation features such as auto‑deleverage, which automatically repays part of a loan when a position’s health deteriorates, and auto‑close, which triggers a full repayment under predefined conditions. Taken together, these additions show that partnering with mainstream apps doesn’t mean freezing innovation; it means making the advanced features of DeFi accessible through well‑designed interfaces.
The adoption story would be incomplete without mentioning the backbone that makes these integrations possible: Morpho’s permissionless and composable architecture. Because Morpho exposes simple smart contracts for depositing, borrowing and managing collateral, any third party can integrate without asking permission. Steakhouse Financial and Gauntlet, two of the largest vault curators, have each surpassed a billion dollars in deposits on Morpho; SparkDAO is close behind. Their vaults allocate capital across markets based on risk appetite, and their reputations help consumer apps choose appropriate strategies. The Privy recipe built by Stripe lets developers embed Morpho‑powered yield within hours by handling authentication, identity verification and wallet management. Hypernative monitoring tools provide real‑time risk analytics for curators and integrators. The result is an ecosystem that feels modular but behaves like a single, unified lending network. Deposit capital in one vault and you might finance a leveraged credit fund in Singapore, a crypto loan in America or a micro loan on World Chain; the matching and risk management are handled behind the scenes.
As Morpho’s lending engine becomes the default backend for wallets and exchanges, it also raises important questions about the future of finance. Will banks and fintechs adopt on‑chain infrastructure as the standard for deposit accounts? How will regulators adapt when millions of retail users earn yield through protocols they don’t directly interact with? Morpho’s partners offer hints at the answer. By embracing transparency and immutability, these integrations preempt many of the pitfalls that plagued centralized lenders in past cycles. Users can verify on chain that their collateral exists and that their loans are properly collateralized; auditors can monitor risk in real time; regulators can inspect flows without requiring access to private databases. At the same time, the front‑ends remain compliant with know‑your‑customer and anti‑money‑laundering rules, thanks to whitelists, KYC gates and identity solutions like World ID. This interplay suggests that the DeFi mullet is not a compromise but an upgrade: mainstream finance layered on top of an open, auditable and programmable credit system.
The partnerships described above are not isolated success stories; they are the early threads of a global financial network being woven in real time. From the largest U.S. exchange to the smallest Latin American fintech, from self‑custody hardware wallets to identity‑anchored mobile apps, Morpho has become the invisible motor that animates savings and credit products for tens of millions of users. These integrations have delivered billions of dollars in cumulative deposits and hundreds of millions in loans without a single centralized custodian. They illustrate that when trust is built into the code and risk is managed transparently, people are willing to engage with on‑chain finance at scale. They also show that user experience and regulatory compliance need not be casualties of decentralization. The DeFi mullet is a practical blueprint for bridging the old world and the new: mainstream platforms handle onboarding, branding and compliance; Morpho handles settlement, risk and yield.
Looking ahead, Morpho’s adoption flywheel seems set to accelerate. New integrations with Cronos and Crypto.com will bring stablecoin lending to wrapped versions of Bitcoin and Ethereum on yet another chain. Additional wallet providers and fintechs across Asia and Africa are exploring Morpho for earn features tailored to local currencies. Real‑world asset strategies are coming online, with tokenized credit funds and carbon credits already being used as collateral on Morpho markets. As these pieces fall into place, the network will move beyond money markets into a full spectrum of programmable financial products. The numbers will keep growing, but the underlying story will remain the same: millions of people leveraging a protocol they never see, made possible by a back‑end they can trust and a front‑end they know. Morpho is not just rewriting the rules of lending; it is teaching the world that finance can be both open and easy to use.
