Morpho opens borrowing against Coinbase stock tokens on Base

Morpho opens borrowing against Coinbase stock tokens on Base

Morpho has gone live on Base with lending and borrowing markets against Coinbase's tokenized stocks, Morpho said in a post on X, with all five stock-backed markets deployed on Sept. 7. Holders of the five supported tokens can pledge them and draw USDC at variable or fixed rates.

For a holder sitting on one of the underlying equities, this is now a way to take a USDC loan without selling the position, with the token acting as on-chain collateral through Morpho's contracts. The catch is geography: the markets are "not available to US persons or persons in other restricted jurisdictions," Morpho said in a reply to its own post, and Coinbase issues the tokens through Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd under Abu Dhabi Global Market prospectuses, offered only outside the U.S.

The markets, the prices, and who can borrow

The five tickers supported on Morpho are AAPLc, GOOGLc, NVDAc, METAc and SPCXc, with Amazon, Microsoft, Strategy, SanDisk and Tesla sitting on Base's stocks page but having no Morpho market. Four of the five run at 62.5% liquidation loan-to-value, or LLTV, and the Alphabet market is set at 77%. Each market reads a Chainlink feed through Morpho's Chainlink V2 oracle adapter; the Apple feed printed $335.49 at 1:42 p.m. UTC Friday against a DefiLlama price of $337.52 for the token, and a market at 62.5% LLTV liquidates at a 12.67% penalty. No liquidation has been executed in the Apple market since deployment.

What's actually been drawn so far

At a 9:48 a.m. ET snapshot, Morpho's API showed $104,401 of stock tokens pledged and $54,652 drawn against them, with $60,265 supplied across the five markets. Borrowing stayed under $600 until Sept. 16, when it rose from $503 to $42,105 in about two hours, Morpho's historical data shows. The largest Apple borrower holds 113.46 AAPLc against a 20,360 USDC loan, with a health factor of 1.17.

Three of the five markets sit at 90% utilization, the target in their interest rate model, with borrowers paying 5.62% and lenders earning 5.06%. The Meta market is at 97%, past the target, where the curve steepens: borrowers pay 17.52% and lenders earn 16.98%.

Where the dollars are coming from

Steakhouse Financial curates all five markets, and its two Steakhouse High Yield USDC vaults supply 98.9% of the dollars in the largest of them. In the Apple market specifically, those two vaults supply $24,540 of the $24,805 lent in, with a third vault, Chipworks USDC, supplying $262, and two wallets supplying less than $3 between them. Steakhouse's Steakhouse High Yield USDC vault holds $29.9 million overall and pays 5.18% net.

What the contracts don't yet do

Morpho's fixed-rate layer, Midnight, has 19 USDC markets against each of the five tokens, 95 in total, with maturities running daily through Sept. 30, then Oct. 30, Nov. 27, Dec. 25 and March 26, 2027, alongside one open-ended market per token. Every one of those fixed-rate markets shows zero units outstanding: all the borrowing so far is in the variable-rate markets. The market contracts themselves carry no permissioning either, with the enter gate and liquidator gate on each fixed-rate market set to the zero address, Morpho's API shows.

What to watch next

The five tokens have about $11.4 million outstanding on Base, by contract total supply and Morpho's price feeds, and the $104,401 pledged on Morpho is under 1% of that. Morpho holds $4.03 billion in deposits on Base and $10.42 billion across chains, per DefiLlama, and MORPHO trades at $2.40, up 11% over 24 hours, on a $1.68 billion market capitalization, per CoinGecko.

Base's stocks page lists Aave and Euler alongside Morpho as places to borrow against the same tokens. The fixed-rate maturities on Morpho exist but every one shows zero units outstanding, while the variable-rate side sits at $54,652 drawn against $104,401 pledged. Whether the fixed-rate side ever draws a borrower, or the variable-rate side has to grow a hundredfold before this looks like a market, is the open question.