Morpho, a decentralized cryptocurrency lending protocol, raised $50 million in a strategic funding round led by Ribbit Capital, an early-stage investor in fintech firms including Robinhood, Revolut and Coinbase.

Also participating in the private token sale were heavy hitters like a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Variant, Pantera, Brevan Howard, BlockTower and Kraken Ventures. Morpho’s valuation based on the funding was not disclosed. The company raised $18 million of funding back in 2022, when the firm’s CEO, Paul Frambot, was still in his third year at college.

The goal here is to take the relatively rarified and inward-looking world of decentralized finance (DeFi) and fuse it with the base protocol layers of the internet. Having launched two years ago, Morpho has evolved from its role as an optimization layer that improved interest rates for users of Aave and Compound (ruffling some feathers in the process), to become Morpho Blue, a base infrastructure that others can build crypto lending applications on with their own risk-management strategies.

“Our ambition has always been: how do we break out of DeFi?” Frambot said in an interview with CoinDesk. “How do we make sure that eventually – maybe not in the short term – we're able to transform private financial infrastructures into public goods?”

This is where the strategic involvement of fintech backers like Ribbit and others comes in, since portfolio companies such as Robinhood and Revolut, with their massive distribution channels, can use Morpho to design lending and borrowing use cases in a flexible manner without fragmenting liquidity, Frambot said.

“We need to bridge the gap for DeFi and make the actual integration into the fintech world, and Ribbit was an obvious partner for that,” Frambot said. “Already there are incredible synergies in what we could achieve together for potential integrations in the real world, and not just like crypto leverage use case, which is, frankly, most of the use case of DeFi lending right now.”

Other investors in the round included: Hack VC, IOSG, Rockaway, L1D, Mirana, Cherry, Semantic, Fenbushi, Leadblock Bitpanda and Robot Ventures.