Morpho, a decentralized lending protocol operating on Ethereum, HyperEVM, and other blockchains currently holding $6.6 billion in total value locked, has raised $175 million in a funding round led by Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz’s digital assets arm a16z crypto — valuing the protocol at up to $2 billion and positioning it for an eventual public debut as its founders set their sights on bringing Wall Street’s most traditional institutions into DeFi, according to Fortune’s report published June 9.

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The round also drew participation from Apollo Funds, Circle’s venture unit, and VanEck — a coalition of backers that spans crypto-native venture capital, traditional asset management, and institutional finance simultaneously. The investment was structured in cryptocurrency and priced at the token’s average monthly price, with the exact cost varying by when participants contributed, per Fortune’s reporting of co-founder Paul Frambot’s account.

ETH's price trends to the downside on the daily chart. Source: ETHUSD on Tradingview

The 25-Year-Old Taking On TradFi

Frambot, who is 25 years old and founded Morpho at 20 alongside three fellow French co-founders — Merlin Egalite, Julien Thomas, and Mathis Gontier Delaunay — framed the fundraise with characteristic directness in his conversation with Fortune. “I think TradFi is going to have to wear shorts,” he told the publication — a reference to the cultural gap between crypto’s hoodie-and-shorts developer community and the suit-wearing institutions he is now actively courting.

His pitch to those institutions is grounded in yield. Morpho allows any user to create their own blockchain-based lending markets with customizable risk parameters — effectively enabling anyone to build their own version of Aave, the incumbent DeFi lender that currently holds nearly $12.5 billion in TVL, per Fortune’s citing of DeFiLlama data. Morpho’s $6.6 billion positions it as the clear second-largest player in the decentralized lending space, a gap that has narrowed considerably after Aave’s significant exposure to a $290 million hack of other crypto protocols in April 2026, per Fortune.

Ethereum And Crypto DeFi: The Institutions Already Inside

Morpho’s existing user base signals the institutional crossover is already underway. Coinbase, Kraken, Anchorage Digital, and Galaxy Digital all use Morpho’s infrastructure, per Fortune’s reporting. Guy Wuollet, general partner at a16z crypto, described the moment to Fortune as one where traditional finance professionals may need casual Fridays while DeFi builders dress up ever so slightly — a convergence he views as the natural direction of an industry increasingly operating in lockstep with institutional capital.

Frambot himself recently attended an event at the New York Stock Exchange — and wore trousers. This development marks a pivotal moment for the nascent sector’s relationship with mainstream venture capital and traditional finance.

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A $175 million raise from three of the most prominent names in both crypto, Ethereum, and conventional investing — targeting the same Wall Street institutions that have spent two years cautiously circling DeFi — is the clearest signal yet that decentralized lending is no longer a crypto-insider experiment. It is becoming infrastructure that institutional capital intends to use.

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The Ethereum Foundation’s protocol track leads published a new “Protocol Priorities Update for 2026” on Feb. 18, outlining how core R&D will be organized this year and what the next upgrade cycle is expected to emphasize.

Ethereum’s Priorities In 2026

The update looks back at 2025 as a high-throughput year for mainnet changes, anchored by two network upgrades. Pectra shipped in May, Fusaka followed in December with PeerDAS on mainnet. Alongside those upgrades, the community increased the mainnet gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, calling it the first significant jump since 2021.

The main change is organizational. “Now that those milestones are behind us, we have the opportunity to think about how we organize our work at a slightly higher level,” the authors wrote. For 2026, Protocol work is grouped into three tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1, each with named leads.

The Scale track, led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani, merges last year’s “Scale L1” and “Scale Blobs” initiatives into one effort. The foundation frames this as a pragmatic consolidation, because execution capacity, networking, and consensus changes tend to land in the same client code and influence each other.

On the roadmap, the update highlights continued gas limit increases “toward and beyond 100M,” supported by block-level access lists via EIP-7928 and ongoing client benchmarking. It also flags “the scaling components of Glamsterdam,” including enshrined PBS through EIP-7732, repricings, and further blob parameter increases.

Beyond that, the Scale track includes pushing a zkEVM attester client from prototype toward production readiness, and longer-run state scaling work that spans near-term repricing and history expiry through to binary trees and statelessness.

The Improve UX track, led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, narrows in on two areas the foundation calls the most leverage for 2026 usability: native account abstraction and interoperability.

On account abstraction, the update positions EIP-7702 as a step toward an endpoint where smart contract wallets become the default without bundlers, relayers, or extra gas overhead. It points to proposals including EIP-7701 and EIP-8141, described as “Frame Transactions,” as work that moves smart account logic deeper into the protocol itself.

That UX roadmap is also tied to security direction. The foundation argues native account abstraction provides a cleaner migration path away from ECDSA-based authentication, and says parallel proposals aim to make quantum-resistant signature verification meaningfully cheaper inside the EVM.

Interoperability work builds on the Open Intents Framework with the stated goal of “seamless, trust-minimized cross-L2 interactions,” supported by faster L1 confirmations and shorter L2 settlement times.

The new Harden the L1 track, led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery, is framed as insurance policy work that preserves Ethereum’s core properties while scaling continues.

The update ties security efforts to Svantes’ Trillion Dollar Security Initiative, including post-quantum readiness and execution-layer safeguards like post-execution transaction assertions and “trustless RPCs.”

On censorship resistance, Thiery’s scope includes FOCIL via EIP-7805 and extensions that touch censorship resistance for blobs, statelessness work labeled VOPS, and the development of measurable censorship-resistance metrics. Jayanthi’s remit covers devnets, testnets, and client interoperability testing, which the foundation says becomes more critical if Ethereum moves into a faster fork cadence.

Looking ahead, the foundation targets Glamsterdam for the first half of 2026, with Hegotá planned later in the year. The stated ambition bundles parallel execution, significantly higher gas limits, enshrined PBS, continued blob scaling, and progress on censorship resistance, native account abstraction, and post-quantum security, with more track-level updates promised as the year unfolds.

At press time, Ethereum traded at $1,968.

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The Ethereum Foundation is realigning its developmental strategy to address core protocol efficiency and user experience challenges, following recent leadership changes earlier this year.

Co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak outlined the updated focus areas in a public statement on X earlier today, emphasizing that the shift is intended to strengthen Ethereum’s long-term scalability while improving near-term usability.

Protocol Upgrades and a Revised Role for Vitalik Buterin

Stańczak described the discussions surrounding Ethereum’s base-layer roadmap as extensive and community-driven, noting that the changes are designed to sharpen focus among researchers and core developers. Stańczak wrote:

Our discussions about the Layer 1 scaling roadmap have been extensive, and the feedback so far suggests that the community appreciates our ambition. Turning that ambition into reality now depends on the focus of the core development teams and researchers.

As part of its strategic transition, the Ethereum Foundation is aiming to give Vitalik Buterin more time to focus on advanced research rather than daily operational oversight.

“We aimed, among other things, to free more of Vitalik’s time for research and exploration,” Stańczak stated, adding that Buterin’s recent writings on topics like RISC-V and zkVMs have been instrumental in directing attention toward potentially “transformative technologies.”

According to Stańczak, these insights have played a significant role in realigning the Ethereum community around long-term priorities, such as privacy, modularity, and decentralized infrastructure.

Stańczak clarified that Buterin’s proposals are not mandates but starting points for community-led exploration:

Vitalik’s proposals will always carry weight, but they are intended to start conversations and encourage progress in difficult research areas.

He also stressed the importance of giving other researchers the same freedom, highlighting ongoing work by contributors like Justin Drake and Tankard Feist.

Overall. the Foundation’s research direction is now geared toward short-term outcomes that include better Layer-1 scaling, enhanced Layer-2 integration, and more “seamless” user experiences—especially in upcoming upgrades like Pectra, Fusaka, and Glamsterdam.

RISC-V Proposal and Developer Flexibility

The Foundation is also assessing the feasibility of moving from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to a more modern execution environment powered by RISC-V.

This proposal, initially introduced by Buterin, suggests that RISC-V could streamline execution, improve efficiency, and simplify zero-knowledge proof implementation.

“We are exploring ways to bring forward projects that currently look three to five years away,” Stańczak noted, referencing possible acceleration in next-gen execution and consensus layer development.

RISC-V’s benefits include broader language compatibility and the potential for backward compatibility with existing EVM contracts. Developers could continue using Solidity and Vyper or expand into languages like Rust.

Additionally, RISC-V could improve validator performance through hardware-level customization, while maintaining core Ethereum features such as account models and contract interactions.

As research and experimentation continue, Stańczak emphasized the importance of community input: “Ethereum researchers often ask that readers recognize the exploratory nature of their posts and proposals. Focus remains essential.”

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