Money Code
The future of finance is digital. Welcome to Money Code, the show that decodes stablecoins and the evolution of programmable money for builders, investors, and decision-makers. Each week, join hosts Chuk Okpalugo, Author of Stablecoin Blueprint and Raj Parekh, Head of Payments/Stablecoins at Monad Foundation as they break down the systems and strategies of seasoned operators in the space, revealing the insights you need for better build and buy decisions.
Money Code
Why Enterprises Are Moving Billions Into Onchain Lending w/ Paul Frambot (Morpho)
Presented by Stablecon; Powered by BVNK.
In episode 12 of Money Code, hosts Chuk Okpalugo and Raj Parekh are joined by Paul Frambot, CEO of Morpho, a leading lending protocol.
Paul explains how Morpho became the lending stack behind players like Coinbase by acting as infrastructure, not a fund, and by letting curators design their own markets.
He lays out how open ledgers, enterprise-grade code, and competitive underwriting could turn onchain vaults into the savings and credit layer for fintechs, banks, and allocators.
About Stablecon
Stablecon (https://stablecon.com/) is the premier gathering for those at the intersection of DeFi, economic policy, financial infrastructure, and institutional integration, and those reinventing global commerce.
By convening the brightest minds in fintech and crypto, Stablecon provides attendees with world class thought leadership and fosters unparalleled networking and strategic collaboration across the digital payments industry. Whether you’re building, advising, or navigating this new frontier, this is the room where it happens.
About BVNK
BVNK is the leading provider of stablecoin payments infrastructure, helping businesses move money faster, settle globally, and even launch their own stablecoin products. Head to https://bvnk.com/ to learn more.
Connect with the Hosts & Guest
Chuk Okpalugo: LinkedIn, X, stablecoinblueprint.com
Raj Parekh: LinkedIn, X, monad.xyz
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Financial products that are built on an open ledger are fundamentally more efficient, meaning that they're going to be able to access global books where everybody can connect and everybody can compete and offer the best possible pricing. When Coinbase moved away from their centralized landing product, what truly it offered them is to be able to have deeper liquidity, better pricing for their users. Now anyone can come in and lend against those Coinbase users and offer them a better rate if you think that they're paying too high. And that's new. And that's new in general for the entire financial world, right? Open the openness of the ledger drives competition in general in a way that reduces spread pretty drastically. So that's the big one.
Chuk Okpalugo:This is MoneyCode. It's a show where we decode stablecoins and programmable money so that you can better prepare for an on-chain future. I'm Chuck Oklpalugo, your host and author of Stablecoin Blueprint, and I'm here with my co-host Raj Perekh, head of stablecoins and payments at Monad. Good to see you today, Raj. How are you doing?
Raj Parekh:I'm good. Excited to be here. I see you've got your sweater on here. It's cold, it's winter, so most prepared.
Chuk Okpalugo:Yeah, yes. Um I'm in the UK at the moment. It's not as cold as New York, uh, but uh it's uh something to get used to. And today we're joined by Paul Frambot, CEO of Morpho, one of the leading decentralized lending protocols. Welcome to the show, Paul. How are you?
Paul Frambot:Hey, thanks for having me. I'm good. Thanks.
Chuk Okpalugo:Awesome. In this conversation, we're gonna dive into how blockchains are rewiring borrowing and investing. Why should you care about this? I mean, borrowing and lending powers the bulk of profits for the world's largest financial institutions. It's a multi-trillion dollar TAM and it's moving on-chain. Morpho has exploded 5x this year to almost 10 billion deposits and 3 billion in active loans. Powerhouses like Coinbase, Society General Forge, Apollo are building a Morpho for the next generation products. Since launched earlier this year, 20,000 Climbase users have deposited around 1.5 billion in Bitcoin collateral and borrowed well over a billion dollars. ETHPAC loans alive and scaling quickly. Other client-based users can lend their USDC2 into this pool and receive around 8 to 10% APY. So if you're building for consumers, enterprises, financial institutions, or if you're an allocator of capital, more phone needs to be on your radar. So before we dive in, just a quick note. Money code is brought to you by Stablecoin Media and powered by BVNK. The views and opinions of the hosts and guests are their own and may not represent their companies, and nothing we discussed today constitutes investment advice or any other form of advice. Okay, so let's dive in. Paul, so Morpho has quickly become one of the most trust trustworthy uh financial products in decentralized lending. What does Morpho do? And why has it gathered guarded so much in deposits today?
Paul Frambot:Sure. So Morpho is uh infrastructure for um lending and borrowing on-chain, meaning that we provide a stack for anyone to build their own yield product uh or loan product uh based on the specific risk or compliance requirement that they may have fully on-chain. So I think you know historically how how DeFi lending has worked in the past is like the protocol itself, like in compound or in Ave, does the underwriting, meaning that they're in charge of managing the assets, of upgrading the code, and of you know deciding who gets to borrow and who gets to lend. Um on the Morphous stack, it's it's fully permissionless, it's fully immutable, and it takes the position not as an asset manager, but as an infrastructure for asset managers to build and deploy the financial products that they they want to use and control. So this positioning is interesting because our direct users are not the lenders, right, uh, or depositors of capital. Our direct users are capital managers, right, that uh are in charge of orchestrating capital in a risk-informed way uh and build financial products that are designed for a specific user base. And that is interesting for enterprises, right, in general. Like, you know, if as you think more of stablecoins, as like as more and more enterprises understand stablecoin as their checking account, um, you know, a morpho vault is seen as the savings account, right? Okay, I I understood as a big fintech, for example, that I can track my users' deposits using stablecoins uh in a very like on-chain native way with all the composability that it brings and um etc. Now a vault is a very natural way for to generate savings, right? And those guys in general, they want to have control, right? They want to have control over the the product, the pricing, the risk, the liquidity, etc. And so a year ago, we came to the Coinbase team and and you know, at the time they had like a more of a centralized lending product uh that was you know offered to their users uh um with like a central like bucket of liquidity. And and the play for Coinbase as they integrated Morpho for their loans and their deal product was really, hey, um we're gonna access a global book of liquidity when when Coinbase users are effectively plugging into Morpho and borrowing from Morpho, they're they're accessing a global book where you have lenders that are coming from Coinbase, but also outside of Coinbase, say crypto.com, Binance Wallet, Ledger, etc. Those guys are also in that same very book, right? So anyway, so I guess uh to answer your question, like what truly made like Morpho explode in the last year was this like um ownership and customizability uh of the lending product that allowed uh an enterprise adoption that was unprecedented in the DeFi world in general. Like uh I believe Morpho is by far the most adopted by enterprises and large-scale distributors um uh as a DeFi product uh overall. And that is the majority of our focus, and today more and more an increasingly high share of our volume uh on the platform.
Chuk Okpalugo:You mentioned the enterprise adoption. You so this there's often this conversation of DeFi mullet, where there's like DeFi in the back, decentralized finance in the back, and then this user experience at the front. So, what's the benefit for Coinbase or any other enterprise to plug in something like Marco in the back?
Paul Frambot:Sure. So I think it took us a long time as an industry to be able to reach feature parity with Web2, right? In terms of purely user experience. Like you needed scalable infrastructure, right, that was cheap enough, whether that's like you know, scalable layer ones like like monad or or layer twos uh that can offer invisible costs, the same way the server costs in the internet is invisible to the user. And you needed a current abstraction, right? As soon as you have as you have this, well, at least you don't get a worse product than what you have in in Web2. So that's step one. Uh uh that's the front face of the mullet is like in this indistinguishable experiences from from Web2. Now, why is that better to plug onto Web3 Rails, right? I think it there's you know, I'd say four or five main arguments for this. The first reason is that financial products that are built on an open ledger are fundamentally more efficient, meaning that they're going to be able to access global books, right? Where everybody can connect and everybody can compete, right? And offer the best possible pricing. And you know, to my point, when when Coinbase moved away from their centralized landing product for a decentralized uh uh product, what truly it offered them is to be able to have deeper liquidity for their users, better pricing for their users than if they were using a centralized bucket of liquidity from their balance sheet or like from a few partners. Now, anyone like you know, you can come in and lend against uh those Coinbase users and offer them a better rate if you think that they're paying too high, right? And that's new. And that's new in general for the entire financial world, right? Open the openness of the ledger uh drives competition uh in general in a way that reduces spread pretty drastically. So that's the big one, right? And then you have a bunch of other advantages. Everything is open source, so integration is super fast and super easy to do, right? Like, you know, Coinbase, for example, like has open sourced a bunch of like the stuff that they've done with Morpho. So it's very easy for anyone to connect and do the same stuff uh and replicate the exact same product that they have. Um, so that's that's one. Another is effectively transparency. Like, you know, a few years back, another exchange was offering lending and borrowing products, right? And turns out all the collateral of FTX was you know being reappothecated somewhere else. You know, if you're using Coinbase as a borrow product, like you can audit every single dollar of the bitcoins that are being you know deposited and you know exactly where they are at any point in time. So you don't have this fraud risk that you used to have in the centralized financial like use of crypto. And the final one is ownership, right? Is for a lot of those big fintechs and distributors, they own a lot of the distribution, but they don't own the infrastructure, right? They don't own the financial infrastructure. And so I think for them, it's the opportunity to be able to own financial products end-to-end, right? From distribution to infrastructure without relying or less relying on traditional finance in general. And that grows their margin by quite a mile, but it also makes you know more delightful experiences for their customers because they can customize everything top to bottom. So those are like the main reasons DFIMLA exists in general.
Raj Parekh:No, that's awesome. I mean, I think one of the things that you know we've seen historically with financial products broadly is trust. And in that case, the user is trusting Coinbase or Coinbase is trusting Morpho. Um, but to your point, I mean, you know, you guys have made a lot of improvements to make it transparent and open source. But at the same time, like, you know, you're still having the conversation or they're still interacting with Morpho. How has like the trust in Morpho like evolved over time? And how have you guys earned that trust? Where to your point, a lot of the you know, uh customers that you're working with are now asset managers or enterprises or financial institutions. But you know, historically, DeFi has been kind of a bad word for you know for these this segment. But like what has changed and and why do they trust you now?
Paul Frambot:There's uh two key things, I think. Um code and positioning. Code is probably the single biggest, most like the single most important thing of anything in DeFi, right, is like the quality and the trust you can have in the code. And you know, I've I've been building a DeFi for five years now. I have seen so much. Like I like in general, it's crazy how hard it is to build truly, truly safe DeFi proofs. And you know, when I think about the landing space, like I don't know, like we had like tens and tons of of of landing protocols. Like, frankly, the only two that I know that uh haven't been hacked is like Aven Morfo, right? So and and when you think about it, that's crazy, right? It's like we're not talking about like 5% or 10% or 20%, we're talking like 90% of the projects in the decentralized landing space have been hacked, right? Like that's insane. Uh and and so you know it's the nature of the chain and and the EVM in general. It's hard to code good quality code in in the EVM, it's hard to secure it. Um and and we've been extremely, extremely, extremely intentional about this. We take a lot of time to ship a protocol. The protocol we ship are extremely stupidly small, right? Like, you know, the Morpho protocol is 600 lines of code, right? Uh we have an entire formal verification team of three persons internally that you know they spend their time just formally verifying whatever we do, right? And and and so that's a lot of effort goes into this, but I think um you know it it it it that's a big part, I think, in the trust. And then obviously after this, you have like the vetting of some of those enterprises adoption that enter the game and say, Hey, um you you know, as Coinbase, like when we integrated with Coinbase, they went through like this extremely extensive audit process. Uh and and you know, I Will Robinson, the the VP of engineering at the time, like you know, mentioned that you know in in the podcast with me that it was the the most beautiful like piece of code he he had seen on-chain or something around those lines. Uh so I think that went a very long way. And then once you've convinced like the top crypto native players, this resonates across us. Oh, okay, Coinbase, you know, they did a big RFP when they chose their lending partner and they chose Morpho, so it must, you know, it must mean something, right? And then because people trust Coinbase, they they end up trusting Morpho, etc. That's one big piece, right? The second piece is positioning. And I think this one is is tricky because it's more of a PR exercise than anything else. Um Morpho is an infrastructure, we're not a fund, right? And as a result, we so it's permissionless, just like Unisop protocol, for example. And so it's important that people understand that anyone can deploy anything on Morpho. Like tomorrow, you guys could deploy a market that does not make any sense with like featuring like you know, meme coins as collateral or or or other stuff. And actually, the first thing that happened when we deployed the Morpho protocol is like in the hours that followed, like people were creating very dodgy markets uh in Morpho. Uh and obviously getting the market to understand that in the recent years, what has happened is that the management of the financial products has been unbundled from the DeFi protocol. And you see, for example, Uniswap. Like Uniswap has is a builder platform now. You can build hooks. Of course, some hooks will be faulty and some hooks will do crazy stuff, right? That uh, but some hooks will be great as well. And so we have the same positioning in Morpho where we're a platform from any for any asset manager to come in. And I think getting the message across that Morpho is infrastructure, that we don't manage funds ourselves, we let asset managers, whether they're coming from TratFi or from crypto or from a fintech background, uh uh, and you know, what we promise as as a as a brand is the code and the infrastructure is safe and you're gonna be connected. Morpho offers you global connectivity of your capital, but we don't promise that the every volt in the Morpho stack is only up technology that's never ever going to lose money. You know, vaults are similar to funds, right? And you know, in in RatFi, it's been now very well understood that funds, some of them they blow up, some of them go up, some of them go down, and that's the thing. So I think that was a big piece into earning the trust, is like getting the market to understand this positioning, which everybody does now, by the way. But back then, when we sort of invented this unbundling uh and and uh of of DeFi, it was not abuse because it was the first time someone was doing this, right? So um so anyway.
Chuk Okpalugo:Yeah, it's almost like the it's the democratization of finance and asset management, but almost it's analogous to social media and how that democratized content creation and user-generated content. So YouTube being the infrastructure doesn't have their own producers. Uh but lots of individuals can start to create content, and that content finds its way to people who want it. Uh and YouTube doesn't police it, uh, doesn't highlight it, but you know, and Morfo doesn't police who gets on and what happens, the market decides. And by providing that infrastructure, you're letting folks create and innovate in ways that we can't necessarily predict. But as long as the protocol enables that visibility, that transparency, then uh folks can at least understand okay, where are the assets of your you're investing in meme coins as collateral? Okay, I'm not interested. Or convert a well-trusted uh curator like uh Gauntlet, who we had on the show other recently and Steakhouse and so on. So we were just discussing uh the democratization of finance. Um but today on Morpho, uh the model relies on collateral, and some of the biggest pools have been crypto collateral. And increasingly we're seeing tokenized real-world assets as collateral. And I think the one that I'm most excited by is uh treasuries, because that's the closest thing to uh folks who in finance know that the repo markets, repo markets are the biggest, most liquid asset-backed loan uh lending market in the world. Uh and we're getting there with an equivalent equivalent on-chain. And then obviously, the I guess the mecca of lending is unsecured lending. Maybe you know, you're deep in this world. How do we transition from you know crypto-native collateral to real-world collateral to unsecured lending? What needs to happen?
Paul Frambot:It's a good question. And I spent a lot of time thinking about this in the world. Um and you know, I after many years of thinking, uh I have a very simple and very stupid realization, which are the following is a loan fundamentally is a promise of future value, right? Uh the bar is making a promise to the lender that is gonna come back with some value in the future, and and the lender is is trusting that promise, right? And I think of the role of Morpho in this to be the machine that's gonna price the commitment and the trust that you have in that promise, right? Meaning that if someone says uh, you know, does not know anyone, uh does not know anything about the the bar, but the bar has some liquidatable collateral, well, yes, in some way you could trust that person. That's a very nice way of trusting someone, right? Like I don't know that person, but I know they have Bitcoin, and I know that if the price of Bitcoin goes down, like some liquidators will liquidate. That seems like a trustable commitment, right? And as a result, the market can price it and say, hey, I'll I will underwrite it, right? Or an individual like could could underwrite it, etc. And but there's nothing fundamental of needing a collateral there, right? What you need, the only fundamental thing is the trust in that promise. And this trust can be expressed in different ways. To your point, you could have RWAs as collateral, right? If you trust the liquidation process, if you trust the backing of the RWA, then yes, you could have RWA backloads, right? But those are not even necessary. You know, if tomorrow I come to the Morpha network and I say, hey, I'm Paul, I'm like the CEO of the thing, like you know, I don't have collateral, I don't have legal contract, I don't have anything. I just sign and I prove that I'm you know Paul, right? I'm sure curators would underwrite me. Right? It's a competitive process, it's like an RSP across all the curators, and maybe they give me a terrible rate, like 30 30 something percent, right? So now you're thinking, okay, I didn't make much of a commitment, except maybe in my reputation, right? Um so if I bring in maybe a legal contract and I say, hey, you know, I'm French, so I I I propose like a French enforced, like legal French legal contract, and you know, gauntlets, takeouts, they look at this and they're like, hmm, um, okay, that brings more trust. So I'll I'll I'll I'll bid not at 30%, I'll bid at like 15, right? Or 20. Uh but maybe they trust more US laws. So if I bring in a US contracts and then trust more my promise if it's made in the context of a US law enforcement, then the rate goes down, right? And then maybe I bring some Collateral and and the rate goes even more down. I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that again, there's nothing fundamental here in needing a collateral. The question is more like how can you efficiently price this commitment, right? And and the reason we've been stuck as an industry thinking, how do we achieve undercollateral? Is that we've always put the perspective that the protocol should be underwriting. We should have Morpho issuing the secured loan in the trust uh unsecured loan in a trustless way, but that that does not mean anything. Like the Morpho protocol does not underwrite anything. In the Morpho model, you have a bunch of curators that could be DeFi underwriters, but that could also be credit underwriters. There's nothing stopping a vault from becoming a credit fund, for example. And this liquidity is used to underwrite people as like consumer loans, for example, uh, or you know, loans backed by credit card receivables or whatever that can bring trust, and that's that's that's trouble on chain. And I think the key thing is that you needed two things to make this happen. You needed to externalize risk management, right, which Morpho does by letting anyone choose their risk. But you also need another thing. You need to be able to externalize pricing of the risk. Currently, it's not possible. Currently, in all DeFi, the rate is determined by either governance that is central, or by a formula, right? In the case of Morpho, there is a formula that determines the rate. That's not how the free market works, right? And you know, at the end of the year, we're releasing Morpho V2, which is you know, um fixed rate fixed term protocol, which allows curators to express their rate, right? And as soon as you can say, hey, I choose my risk and I choose my price, this is where you can start underwriting pretty much anything. Right. So anyway, this is the long way of saying in the paradigm where the landing protocol takes the stance of being just the infrastructure that allows anyone to essentially price the risk of those commitments. You this is not even the problem anymore for making under collateral. It's all can happen. Like it's just a matter of like what are the trust primitives that you can bring on chain, whether that's collateral identity, legal contracts, credit score, payment history, there's a bunch of those. Um but yeah, I guess that's the the long answer to your question.
Chuk Okpalugo:Yeah, I think someone, well, many people are working on this. Someone will crack it. You mentioned all those things. When I think about why am I able or not able to get a loan, uh in the UK, it's easier for me to get a loan than in the US, even though I'm it's the same, I'm the same person. They have it's you know, uh uh just in the system, the fact that I'm resident versus non-resident, uh, you know, my financial history is the same, uh, my earning ability is the same. Um, and yet um, you know, the two countries have different credit scoring mechanisms and different abilities to collect uh and you know, reputation and how long how far that goes. And so identity going on-chain, um, other promises uh made, you know, the way that it affects your ability to get future capital from somewhere else, if that was also made on-chain, some kind of like on-chain credit score. Uh these are these are all things that essentially go into the underwriting model of these folks. But I think as you're saying, Morpho allows it to be a free market. Someone will go figure this out. It doesn't have to be the protocol themselves. And and um and Raj, you know, obviously working at Visa in a previous life, you're very, very close to to credit and risk. Uh I'm sure you have some insights from your days there as well.
Raj Parekh:I mean, it's a really it's it's interesting because today when you you know go apply for a card, you get like a blanket, you know, 25 to 35 percent, you know, if you you know, what are variable interest rate? And you've basically plugged in just like a few different inputs to like Paul's point. You maybe you've inputted your income or your social security number, and then from there, there's just like a blanket formula that was just like said, cool. This is like the the risk around it. Now it does then take into consideration like what are my spending behaviors, or have I been you know risky with um, you know, maybe with a a different card, or you know, there's only so much information that it has. It may capture some of that from like previous credit reporting. But outside of that, it's just a quick formula and you get that answer pretty quickly. Um and so it's something that uh to Paul's point, as I'm thinking about this, you're right. We've been over-engineering things, I think, a little bit from the DeFi standpoint and hoping that there's collaterals put in place. But the way that these things have been underwritten for a very long time is just a simple formula. And so let's not over-engineer it. Let's then push that off to the folks that are willing to measure their risk around it and then see where things ultimately evolve as well. And I think on that note, I mean, if I'm a you know, if I'm a fintech or if I'm a financial institution and I'm like, hey, you know, I have a practice of you know giving unsecured loans or some type of, you know, you know, some type of like uh process or product around this, like how do you hope and wish they use Morpho? And is there like if if you know as we've talked into an FI or FinTech, what are you telling them saying, hey, here's like the power of Morpho and here's what you can do with it?
Paul Frambot:Right. So so just to make sure I get the question is like how how how is that pitched to fintech exactly?
Raj Parekh:Like, or is that what is the pitch to fintech? And then I guess like how are you having them think through like the different ways that they can you know build with Morpho? Because there is a lot of management that takes place here. Maybe a fintech's not set up to do it, but maybe a bank is, and so I'm curious like how how you like ultimately end up talking to them about it.
Paul Frambot:Right. So so the chance of this industry, I think, is open source, and why is that? Is because all the work that has been done is sort of like reusable in the sense that the entire package, which is um you know, building uh end-to-end lending or borrowing product, is the code is already there, right? So of course there is a management piece, right? Which is like you know, at some point there is an underwriting process, at some point someone needs to take that decision, and maybe the fintech does not know how to do this and they may want to partner with one of the Morphous curators, right? But but beyond that, um it's pretty straightforward, surprisingly. And I think this is what I love about like the tech native stacks for financial services in general, is that you could build a fintech app that lets you earn yields with Chat GPT in just like less than a day, right now. And and you know, obviously, like there's a bunch of other challenges related to this, like regulation, distribution, etc. But when it comes purely to the infrastructure and product integration components, it's now become extremely straightforward, right? Obviously, uh each fintech has their own requirements in terms of like what's the liquidity of the product they want, what's the type of risk and rate, etc. And usually we guide them through like the different options. Um, same for the compliance piece, like do they need to whitelist, do they need to blacklist, blah, blah, blah. Um, so this will help as well. Um, but generally it's pretty much off the shelves, right? In in in general.
Raj Parekh:That's awesome. And then I guess like, you know, as we're you know, as we're coming on time here as well, but what is what is something you wish or you were surprised you haven't seen yet from folks leveraging you know Morpho? And you know, you've been obviously building in DeFi for a long time right now, and um, you've seen it all, but in some capacity, I'm sure there's more that you would like to see. Like, what's what surprised you that you know that is that isn't there yet?
Paul Frambot:I it's a good question. I'm generally quite optimistic and happy about uh how how how the the space has evolved. I think if you want. I think being able to develop faster, more reliable Oracle would be better for the industry in general. That's one. I think another one would be hey um coming back to the code topic in the first place. It's just how could we empower, and that's more a challenge to like uh infrastructures and and layer ones and layer twos in general, is like how can we empower developers with better ways to secure their their their code and their applications, and I think that's a big it's a hard problem to solve in the EVM world, uh, and there's been a ton of resources allocated to this, but I feel like maybe it deserves a bit more focus uh from the different foundations that are are thinking about about this problem. Um I think those are like the key important things. And the last one I'll say is privacy. I have always been in the theme of like the time to market for privacy is not now, uh, it's for later. Uh and until very recently, until this month, actually, even after talking to all the largest financial institutions in the world, etc., they were all at a stage where it was not important because they were thinking about it through the glance of like proof of stay, uh proof of concept. Um now some of them are thinking more seriously of like, hey, I want to port my entire system on-chain, like my entire back office, right? And for the first time ever, I started to have questions around, hey, how do you make this fully private? Right? Like, I I can't get my and so that's a new thing for me. Uh it's and you know, overall very bullish privacy, but but time to market I was kind of like, huh, is it gonna be like next year or like every year we say it's next year? Like, I don't know. But so for the first time I heard those early signals.
Chuk Okpalugo:Yeah, it's a fascinating problem. Um, there are many smart people working on it, but how do you balance the right trade-offs of okay, it's fully private but verifiable? Uh and some of the things that we like about open permissionless blockchains is the ability to innovate or copy each other, right? You see what's working, you have all the folks making incredible charts on Dune and Artemis and other data providers. Uh, what happens when all this goes away? Uh it is it's a trade-off. And as you say, um, I think for some of these folks to go on chain, particularly for the back office operations, you know, it we it can't be the same way that it's working today, which means that we aren't really in a place where any chain today has everything. Um the certain public chains, uh, Sonana has confidential transfers, uh there's uh privacy-specific blockchains, but the volume is all in different places. We're still not there yet. And you know, markets and networks are very, very hard to build. Um so that's an interesting one. The first thing you mentioned was Oracles. Could you just explain a bit what Oracles do today and what needs to be improved?
Paul Frambot:It's it's it's a good question. So so Oracles is just like the broad notion for saying, hey, there is this data that we don't have on the chain and we want to have it, and there is this like magic wand that brings you the information you need in a reliable way. Um and you know, any work that is done to improve the reliability slash the evaluation plus the breadth of like uh prices and data that you can get on chain is just very valuable for the chain in general. I I think there's so many building blocks that we still need, even you know, and I I take the the the point of view of lending and underwriting. Like in order to do good underwriting, you need to have good data sources that are can be trusted. Sometimes have to be private. Um and and in general, I'm um bringing those data feeds to the chain is such like a critical infrastructure component that I think the more we get in, the more net like share of the economy we bring on chain, frankly. Um uh and I don't think we've fully cracked this problem yet. Like I'm not deep, like a deep Oracle researcher, so I don't have the full details, but just it does not strike me as like a fully solved problem where it's very easy. And maybe it's impossible to fully solve easily, like uh by nature of the problem, but um yeah.
Chuk Okpalugo:Yeah, that makes sense. And you you get me thinking about what sorts of information would be useful for underwriting, but challenging for the individual. So think about like a FICO score. You know, all of a sudden the underwriters may you know, are they public, are they private, you know, are they you know do it in an individual way where it's verifiable but not published public published. Um but you know, I don't think people want their FICO scores on chain, right? But you do want the ability to utilize FICO score. And if you're the underwriter, I want to be able to say this person didn't pay me back. It's verifiable that this person didn't pay me back without them seeing all the information. So it's an interesting problem because it's not purely a technical one. For the, like you said, for the problem that we're discussing. How do you enable a market to compete? That needs some privacy. But then you want the information on chain in a public way, that's transparency. And so there's a that that trade-off there. Um but this has been a fantastic discussion. Uh, you could give me lots of ideas as I explore building in the space, you know, stitching things together, and these conversations are incredibly helpful, helpful to builders. Um, just as we close out here, uh a couple of questions for you. We we've touched on this slightly, but what does success look like for Morpho in five years?
Paul Frambot:I think really what I think, you know, when I come back to like the fundamental vision of what the loan is, etc. Like I just hope that we build infrastructure that reduces the cost of trust, right? That reduces the cost of an individual trusting another individual with their money across across geographical political differences and cultural differences. Like, you know, like World Well, how can we collapse the cost of trust and make sure that we have more human coordination? And that's really the the end goal of what we're trying to build is like building this internet protocol that removes for financing, that removes intermediaries and and builds a more efficient financial system. And the core of building financial infrastructure is to facilitate trust between individuals. Um and that's what gets me going, by the way. That's the reason I build in in this space and and so yeah.
Chuk Okpalugo:Yeah, I mean perfect alignment with the trustless nature of the blockchain and smart contracts. So you found yourself in the in a great place. Okay, so switching away from blockchains, um do you have a particular form of content, book, movie, TV show that you'd recommend or that has shaped your thinking?
Paul Frambot:I don't have one in particular. Um I I don't read too much books, to be completely honest. Like the the thing I like doing is actually uh discussing live a lot with ChatGPT and tell them to like recap as many books as possible to me such that I have like the aggregate version of the books that people recommend me to. You know, like it's like the what when I have to walk from one place to another, I put my headset on and like talk to ChatGPT. It's like, oh, tell me about this book that this guy recommended, and and then try to extract as much as possible. Um, but I don't have one in particular, sorry, uh except this tip uh use Chad GPT. That's a good one.
Chuk Okpalugo:It's uh it's actually very valuable. There's so much information out there in the world, the lessons learned from uh former CEOs, builders in the space, and it's literally a fingertip away. And uh you're making me think, realize that I'm not tapping into that enough. So I'm gonna start doing that as well. And then final question. Um What companies or uh or people in the space should we talk to next? Uh in terms of maybe oracles or this trustless uh underwriting?
Paul Frambot:I think I think curators in general are I mean you you met with the Gauntlet team already, right? So so you probably know. I think the privacy folks are probably uh uh interesting as well to chat with um because they're forced into conversations that are multiple years away ahead of everybody. Um so so that's interesting as well. Um I think the infrastructure space these days is also interesting. Uh I mean we have Raj on the call uh uh already. Um so yeah, I think I would go for this, and then maybe there is the TratFi point of view, obviously, those guys like such an interesting pairing like between TratFi and Crypto. Um and yeah, like the the partnership is interesting uh in in general. Um and how they approach it is is always I think a very fruitful and and in interesting conversation. Some people think about buying, some people think about poaching, some people think about rejecting, and and you know, putting you a regulation in place that you know will prevent you from existing. Some of them acknowledge this is a complete prisoner dilemma for traditional finance and that if they're last to get in, they're they're cooked, so they should get in as soon as possible. Um, you know, I I f I find this fascinating. Like the game theory of like what should be your move as a traditional financial institution is very, very interesting. Um but anyway.
Chuk Okpalugo:That's a whole episode in itself, and maybe if we do that next, we can talk about society general.
Raj Parekh:One quick question for you. So we we did have Kaion, and he he he wanted to rebrand DeFi to on-chain lending. Um I'm curious your view. Do we keep DeFi or do we go on-chain lending? What's the future of branding this place?
Paul Frambot:I think DeFi is such it's like crypto as carries so much bad precedent, unfortunately. I think decentralized finance is the most accurate fundamentally accurate um technical description of what we're doing. It's like decentralization is the root of everything that underpins the openness, uh the composability, censorship resistance, everything, everything is downstream of this. So I love it. But in order for people to get this, it's so unclear. Like it's not as part of the benefits, it's really the how more than the what you get. And I I tend to prefer open finance in general and and on-chain finance. On-chain is great because open has been on-chain has been uh open has been used at at other you know uh eras of of the financial tech. Uh but uh on-chain is great because it's a new world and there is the online parallel with on-chain, which I love. Um especially if you remove the IFN. Don't put the IFN, please. Like uh but uh but yeah.
Chuk Okpalugo:Absolutely. Okay, on-chain lending, let's push it. Although this has been a fantastic episode. I learned a lot, and I hope the listeners did too. Uh Paul, where can folks go to learn more about you and Morpho?
Paul Frambot:At morpho or morpho.org.
Chuk Okpalugo:Perfect.
Raj Parekh:Raj? You can find me on Twitter at rpark and uh mana.xyz.
Chuk Okpalugo:Awesome. And you can find me at stablecoinblueprint.com, Twitter at chuck underscore xyz, and chucklockbligo on LinkedIn. Paul, thanks for this. This was a great episode. Awesome days, Paul. Take it by Thanks so much for listening to Money Code. There was so much to take away from today's conversation. I learned a lot, and I hope you did too.
Raj Parekh:If you enjoyed this episode, do us a favor, share it with someone you. know or give us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast from. Until next time.
