Morpho has gone live with lending markets that let holders of five Coinbase-issued tokenized stocks borrow USDC on Base. The tokens now accepted as collateral are Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta Platforms and SpaceX, listed as AAPLc, GOOGLc, NVDAc, METAc and SPCXc.

The setup gives holders a way to access dollar liquidity without selling their tokenized equity exposure. Morpho said borrowers can use either variable-rate or fixed-rate markets, although early activity has been concentrated entirely on the variable side.

Early usage centers on a small set of markets

Morpho API data showed $104,401 of stock tokens pledged as collateral and $54,652 borrowed as of 9:48 a.m. ET. Total supplied liquidity across the five markets stood at $60,265 at that time.

All five markets were deployed on Sept. 7. Historical data cited in the source shows borrowing stayed below $600 until Sept. 16, when it climbed from $503 to $42,105 in roughly two hours before increasing further to current levels.

Only five of Coinbase's ten tokenized stock tickers on Base currently have Morpho markets. Base's stocks page also lists Amazon, Microsoft, Strategy, SanDisk and Tesla, but no Morpho borrowing market has been launched for those tokens.

Collateral terms vary by token

The Apple, Nvidia, Meta and SpaceX markets have a liquidation loan-to-value ratio of 62.5%, while the Alphabet market is set higher at 77%. Morpho said stock-backed markets, including their parameters and compliance controls, are deployed and configured by curators.

Steakhouse Financial curates all five markets. Its two Steakhouse High Yield USDC vaults provide 98.9% of the dollars in the largest market, according to the source. In the Apple market specifically, the current Steakhouse High Yield USDC vault and an earlier version supply $24,540 of the $24,805 lent, with the remainder coming from the Chipworks USDC vault and two small wallets.

Morpho also said these markets are not available to U.S. persons or people in other restricted jurisdictions. The market contracts themselves do not include permissioning, according to Morpho API data, with restrictions instead tied to the underlying tokens issued by Coinbase through Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd under Abu Dhabi Global Market prospectuses and offered only outside the United States.

Fixed-rate borrowing is live but unused so far

Morpho's fixed-rate layer, Midnight, includes 19 USDC markets for each of the five stock tokens, or 95 markets in total. Maturities run daily through Sept. 30, then extend to Oct. 30, Nov. 27, Dec. 25 and March 26, 2027, alongside one open-ended market for each token.

Despite that buildout, every fixed-rate market showed zero units outstanding. All borrowing recorded so far has come from the variable-rate pools.

Morpho launched Midnight on Base in July and expanded it to Ethereum this month, but for these stock-token markets, borrowers have not yet moved into the fixed-term side.

Pricing, rates and collateral depth

Each market uses a Chainlink price feed through Morpho's Chainlink V2 oracle adapter. The source noted that Apple's feed showed $335.49 at 1:42 p.m. UTC on Friday, compared with a DefiLlama token price of $337.52.

At a 62.5% liquidation loan-to-value ratio, a market liquidates with a 12.67% penalty. The source said no liquidation had occurred in the Apple market since deployment. Its largest borrower held 113.46 AAPLc against a 20,360 USDC loan with a health factor of 1.17.

Utilization has already pushed some rates higher. Apple, Alphabet and Nvidia were each at 90% utilization, the target in their interest-rate model, where borrowers paid 5.62% and lenders earned 5.06%. Meta was at 97% utilization, beyond the target range, with borrowing at 17.52% and lender yield at 16.98%.

A limited slice of Coinbase's tokenized stock supply

The five supported stock tokens have about $11.4 million outstanding on Base based on contract supply and Morpho price feeds, according to the source. The $104,401 posted on Morpho amounts to less than 1% of that pool, indicating adoption is still small relative to circulating supply.

The launch nonetheless adds a DeFi use case for Coinbase's tokenized equities, which the exchange began issuing in August for users outside the U.S. who hold them in self-custodial wallets rather than brokerage accounts. Base's stocks page also lists Aave and Euler as venues to borrow against the tokens, suggesting Morpho is joining an already forming lending market around the assets.

The next clear signal to watch is whether usage expands beyond the initial five tickers and whether fixed-rate borrowing starts to attract demand. For now, activity remains concentrated in a handful of variable-rate pools with modest collateral balances.

Source: thedefiant.io