Morpho opens Base USDC loans against five Coinbase tokenized stocks
By 8bitcrypto
September 19, 2026
Morpho is now letting holders of five Coinbase-issued tokenized stocks pledge those tokens on Base and borrow USDC without selling the equity exposure. Altcoin Buzz and WalletInvestor date the Saturday desk read to Morpho’s own launch posts and API snapshots: the five stock-backed markets went live on September 7, and a Friday morning read showed about $104,401 in stock tokens pledged against roughly $54,652 in USDC drawn, with about $60,265 supplied across the five markets. That is pilot-scale credit, not a deep RWA book—but it is the first clear weekend wire turning Coinbase stock tokens into live Morpho collateral. Base’s stocks page also lists Aave and Euler as borrow venues against the same token set, so Morpho is not the only credit rail—but it is the one with the clearest Friday utilization tape.
The supported tickers are AAPLc, GOOGLc, NVDAc, METAc, and SPCXc. Base’s broader stocks page still lists names such as Amazon, Microsoft, Strategy, SanDisk, and Tesla without matching Morpho markets, so the borrow path is narrower than Coinbase’s full on-chain equity menu. Four of the five Morpho markets run a 62.5 percent liquidation loan-to-value, while the Alphabet market is set at 77 percent. Each market reads a Chainlink feed through Morpho’s Chainlink V2 oracle adapter. Altcoin Buzz’s Friday check put the Apple feed at $335.49 against a DefiLlama AAPLc print near $337.52, with a 12.67 percent liquidation penalty on the 62.5 percent LLTV setup and no Apple-market liquidation since deployment.
Geography is a hard gate. Morpho said the markets are not available to U.S. persons or other restricted jurisdictions. Coinbase issues the tokens through Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd under Abu Dhabi Global Market prospectuses, offered only outside the United States. For eligible holders, the product pitch is classic DeFi credit with an equity wrapper: keep tokenized share exposure, raise USDC, and stay inside a Coinbase-adjacent loop—Coinbase stock tokens, Coinbase-incubated Base, Morpho lending markets. That loop sits next to—but is not the same as—Coinbase Derivatives’ separate CFTC filing path for U.S. single-stock perpetuals, which still sits at Approval Pending and grants no share ownership.
Utilization and rates already show uneven heat. Three of the five markets sat at about 90 percent utilization—the interest-model target—with borrowers paying roughly 5.62 percent and lenders earning about 5.06 percent in the Altcoin Buzz snapshot. The Meta market ran hotter at about 97 percent, where the curve steepens to roughly 17.52 percent paid by borrowers and 16.98 percent earned by lenders. Borrowing stayed under $600 until September 16, then jumped from about $503 to $42,105 in roughly two hours. The largest Apple borrower held about 113.46 AAPLc against a 20,360 USDC loan with a health factor near 1.17.
Liquidity is concentrated. Steakhouse Financial curates all five markets, and its two Steakhouse High Yield USDC vaults supply about 98.9 percent of the dollars in the largest of them. In the Apple market alone, those vaults supplied about $24,540 of roughly $24,805 lent in, with Chipworks USDC and two wallets covering the rest. WalletInvestor separately flagged a single-curator pattern as the main supply-side risk at this size. Morpho’s fixed-rate Midnight layer lists dozens of USDC maturities against the same five tokens through dates into March 2027, but every fixed-rate market showed zero units outstanding—all live borrowing is variable-rate. Across Base, the five tokens have about $11.4 million outstanding by contract supply and Morpho feeds, so the $104,401 pledged on Morpho is still under 1 percent of that float. Morpho itself holds about $4.03 billion in deposits on Base and $10.42 billion across chains, per DefiLlama figures cited in the coverage.
RWA desk’s Saturday verdict stays tight. Morpho turned five Coinbase stock tokens into borrowable Base collateral with real USDC drawn, Steakhouse-curated supply, Chainlink pricing, and an explicit non-U.S. access gate. The mechanism is live; the book is still tiny. Watch whether more curators arrive, whether Midnight fixed-rate markets ever clear a unit, and whether pledged balances climb beyond a rounding error of the $11.4 million Base stock-token float before calling this a scaled tokenized-equity credit market.
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