MORPHO, the native token of the Morpho Protocol, has surged more than 30% to hit a new all-time high as cryptocurrencies registered notable gains on New Year’s Eve.
The Morpho token reached an intraday high of $3.61, setting a new all-time high amid a 153% spike in trading volume. Over the past 24 hours, trading volume stood at $144.7 million. The price of MORPHO has surged more than 160% in the past month.
Gains for the decentralized finance protocol have pushed the total value locked on Morpho to $5.26 billion.
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The protocol’s TVL, daily fees, and monthly active users have soared amid its expansion into the Ethereum layer-2 network ecosystem.
As an infrastructure platform for on-chain loans, Morpho provides various use cases, including credit card and savings functionalities, permissioned markets, and bridge asset deposits. The protocol boasts notable integrations with platforms such as Moonwell, Centrifuge, and Coinbase.
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Interest in its product has thus not attracted just traders, but major institutional investors as well. This showed in the project’s recently raised $50 million funding round, which pulled in crypto venture capital powerhouses.
Ribbit Capital led the strategic round, but also backing Morpho are VC giants a16z, Pantera Capital, Fenbushi Capital and Coinbase Ventures. This backing offers a great footing for Morpho, with investors bullish on long term potential. Donald Trump’s election last November also buoyed the broader industry, with multiple DeFi tokens spiking amid the bull market rally.
Notably, the recent move by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has DeFi proponents up in arms against the broker reporting rules.
Read more: IRS targets DeFi: Blockchain groups challenge new broker reporting rule
