The lending platform Morpho, whose TVL is already approaching $8 billion, has received $775 million in pre-deposits from the Stable project — a network associated with Bitfinex.
According to Morpho, the funds will be distributed among several vaults on the platform and managed by Gauntlet — a third-party risk manager that already oversees strategies for the protocol. Currently, Morpho ranks eighth among DeFi projects by total value locked.
This deal reflects a general trend: more and more capital is flowing into protocols offering managed yield. The total TVL of the DeFi sector grew to $161 billion by October, up from $93 billion in April.
Morpho also announced support for the Optimism network — a scalable layer 2 solution based on Ethereum. According to DeFiLlama, about $350 million is currently locked in DeFi protocols on Optimism.
To attract users to the new network, the Morpho team launched a program for 300,000 OP tokens, which starts today. The OP token is currently trading at $0.439 — down 3.4% in 24 hours, but up 4% for the week, according to CoinGecko.
Scandal around Stable
The news about the pre-deposit coincided with another high-profile event, the controversial launch of the Stable vault. When the team opened access to the $825 million vault, more than half of the funds had already come from wallets linked to the developers before the public launch. This sparked sharp criticism from the DeFi community.
See also: ETHZilla sold $40M in ETH for a stock buyback
In response, Stable promised a second round of deposits, which is expected to take place next week. The launch time will be announced a day before the start.
New yield pools from Pendle
Also today, the Pendle protocol, with a TVL of $7.4 billion, announced the launch of Stable vaults on its platform. Two new pools have launched: ctStableUSDT and ctStablefrxUSD, which will be active until November 20, 2025.
They allow users to earn fixed yield on stablecoin deposits.
“Thanks to our fixed yield infrastructure, these savings can now work much more efficiently,” Pendle stated.
Deposit limits in the pools match the limits of the underlying Concrete vaults. Once the limit is reached, only current depositors will be able to add funds.
“Stable provides stable infrastructure for mass and institutional adoption of stablecoins, and Pendle creates the yield economy. Together, they lay the foundation for scalable DeFi applicable in the real world,” the team emphasized.
