Customers can secure loans by using their crypto assets as collateral through the decentralized lending protocol Morpho, allowing them to borrow up to $100,000 in Circle’s USDC stablecoin without having to sell their holdings, Coinbase said on X. The exchange noted that the offering is accessible across the United States, with the exception of New York.
The expansion introduces several retail-favored cryptocurrencies into a lending product that had largely centered on Bitcoin and Ether. The lending service started supporting Ethereum in November, following the addition of Bitcoin more than a year prior. Under the program, users are able to borrow up to $5 million in USDC using Bitcoin as collateral, while loans backed by Ether are capped at $1 million.
Although holders of Ether and ADA can generate returns through staking on their respective networks, tokens such as XRP, Dogecoin, and Litecoin lack native yield features.
For these investors, taking loans against their crypto holdings has emerged as one of the limited options for accessing liquidity without selling their assets.
Advertisement
“No matter what you’re holding, you should be able to leverage your crypto without having to sell,” Coinbase’s product lead Jacob Frantz said. “Being able to borrow against more tokens means more opportunity to make your crypto work for you, and it’s an exciting preview to a future where all kinds of tokenized assets can be used to build better financial services.”
The development underscores Coinbase’s ongoing push to expand the product’s reach as loan originations near $2 billion, according to data from Dune Analytics.
Data from CoinGecko showed that XRP, Dogecoin, Cardano, and Litecoin carried a combined market capitalization of $117 billion as of publication time. While that figure represents less than half of Ethereum’s valuation, the tokens have attracted significant interest from retail investors in recent years.
The development could represent a significant opportunity for Coinbase. In a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the exchange disclosed that it held $17.2 billion worth of XRP on its platform as of Dec. 31.
Crypto-backed lending has often been promoted as a tax-efficient approach, as borrowing against an asset typically does not generate capital gains liabilities in the way a sale would. However, if the value of the collateral drops significantly compared with the outstanding loan, the position may be liquidated, allowing a third party to settle the debt and claim the collateral at a discounted rate.
