SwissBorg Leverages Morpho Vaults For USDC Earn Product

Morpho, a permissionless web3 lending protocol, is branching into CeFi for the first time.

On Aug. 10, SwissBorg, a crypto-focussed fintech platform serving the European market, announced the launch of a yield-bearing USDC Earn product leveraging the Morpho protocol. The new product is now available to users of SwissBorg’s app, providing a web2 audience access to a custom Morpho Vault.

SwissBorg’s USDC Earn offering provides access to Morpho’s WBTC/USDC and wstETH/USDC markets, marking the first use of Morpho’s Vaults in a CeFi setting.

“This partnership also underscores Morpho’s ambition to be the best financial infrastructure not just for DeFi applications, but also for institutional and fintech use cases,” Morpho said.

SwissBorg said that Morpho Vaults provide customizable infrastructure allowing CeFi platforms to build tailored products, reducing the perceived risks associated with typical web3 lending protocols that “expose all users to a broad range of assets with a single, standardized risk profile.”

“This targeted approach ensures that SwissBorg’s users benefit from higher security and risk-adjusted yields without unnecessary exposure to riskier assets,” SwissBorg said. “This new offering will be seamlessly integrated into the SwissBorg app, providing users — who typically do not interact directly with blockchains — easy access to on-chain yield opportunities.”

The yields are derived from a vault curated by Gauntlet, a risk management firm. Current annual returns are roughly 3.6% plus additional MORPHO rewards, with Gauntlet taking a 5% commission.

SwissBorg was founded in 2017 and launched the SwissBorg Wealth app in April 2020. The company now boasts $1.1 billion in assets under custody and 803,000 verified users.

Morpho’s rise

Morpho has enjoyed explosive growth since the start of 2023, with the project’s total value locked (TVL) soaring 647% to $1.37 billion from $183.3 million in 19 months, according to DeFi Llama. Morpho tagged an all-time high TVL of $1.91 billion in mid-July.

Morpho’s success has been propelled by its permissionless vault infrastructure, which allows third-party developers to build bespoke lending products using the protocol.

In June, Morpho launched on Base, the bubbling Layer 2 from Coinbase, through a partnership with Moonwell, which integrated WETH and USDC lending vaults on the network.

Last month, Centrifuge, a tokenized real-world asset (RWA) protocol, leveraged Morpho Vaults to launch the first RWA lending markets on Base. Morpho’s RWA Vaults support collateral in the form of tokenized U.S. treasury funds from the prominent tokenized RWA issuers Centrifuge, Midas, and Hashnote.

Morpho currently hosts a $78.6 million TVL on Base.