Welcome to our first Money Code Episode Brief, where we distill each Money Code episode into the key ideas and implications that matter.

This week’s conversation with Morpho CEO Paul Frambot explores why onchain lending is moving beyond DeFi natives and into enterprise balance sheets, and what actually drives trust, liquidity, and credit at scale.

See the full episode below or listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, Youtube, or your favorite podcast platform. Don’t forget to follow Money Code on X (@moneycodepod) and LinkedIn. 

Money Code is presented by Stablecon and Powered by BVNK.

Episode Brief: Why Enterprises Are Moving Billions Into Onchain Lending w/ Paul Frambot (Morpho)

Why this episode matters

On-chain lending is quietly becoming one of the most “real” parts of crypto: it directly touches credit, risk, and the core profit engine of traditional finance. In this episode, Morpho CEO Paul Frambot explains why the next wave of adoption will not come from retail DeFi users. It will come from enterprises and capital managers plugging into open on-chain infrastructure to offer loans and yield products inside familiar front-ends.

Morpho’s bet is simple but consequential: stop treating the protocol as the underwriter. Make it the infrastructure layer, and let the market compete on risk management, compliance, and pricing.

The core ideas you should take away

• Morpho is “lending infrastructure,” not an asset manager. Unlike earlier DeFi lending protocols that underwrite and manage risk at the protocol level, Morpho positions itself as immutable, permissionless rails that lets others (curators/capital managers) build lending and yield products with their own constraints.
• The real unlock is an open global liquidity book. Coinbase didn’t move from centralized lending to Morpho primarily for ideology. The advantage is deeper liquidity + better pricing driven by open competition: anyone can lend into the same markets and tighten spreads.
• Transparency is a feature, not a slogan. Paul contrasts on-chain auditability with the hidden rehypothecation and opacity risks that showed up in centralized crypto lending. In principle, users can verify where collateral is and how it’s used.
• Trust in DeFi comes from code quality and “smallness.” A recurring point: secure DeFi primitives are brutally hard. Morpho’s approach is minimal code, heavy verification, and an enterprise-grade audit process that created a credibility flywheel after Coinbase.
• Unsecured lending is not blocked by “lack of collateral,” it’s blocked by “pricing trust.” Paul reframes a loan as a promise of future value. Collateral is just one way to make that promise credible. Identity, legal contracts, payment history, and reputation are also trust primitives. The missing piece is a market mechanism where underwriters can choose risk and set price.
• Morpho’s roadmap points toward market-driven credit. Paul tees up Morpho V2 as a step toward fixed-rate / fixed-term lending where curators can express pricing, which is closer to how real credit markets work than formula-driven variable rates.

What this changes

• If you’re a fintech or exchange, the “DeFi mullet” idea is maturing: you can give users a normal Web2 experience while outsourcing lending/yield rails to open infrastructure, while still controlling product decisions via curated vaults and policies.
• If you’re a capital allocator, on-chain lending is starting to look less like “a protocol you deposit into” and more like a platform where underwriting expertise becomes the product.
• If you care about RWAs, the most interesting direction is not “tokenized collateral exists.” It’s whether liquidation, legal enforceability, and data feeds can make real-world trust legible enough to price on-chain at scale.

What we didn’t fully resolve

• Trust primitives at scale: what will actually work first for undercollateralized credit (legal wrappers, identity, credit scores, cash-flow underwriting, receivables)?
• Privacy vs. composability: institutions increasingly want to put back office workflows on-chain, but privacy trade-offs threaten the openness that makes on-chain markets powerful.
• Oracles as a bottleneck: underwriting wants richer, more reliable data on-chain, but “bringing the world’s data” on-chain safely may be structurally hard.

If you listen, listen for this

Paul’s most useful reframing is that “unsecured lending” is not a singular breakthrough that the protocol has to invent. It’s a pricing and trust marketplace problem. Once risk management and pricing are externalized to competing underwriters, the space opens up far beyond crypto-collateral loops.