Earlier this year, the non-profit pledged to update its treasury management practices and engage directly with the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem.
The Ethereum Foundation is expanding its DeFi-focused treasury management strategy with a fresh deployment of 2,400 ETH, worth some $9.6 million, and about $6 million worth of stablecoins, in a yield-bearing Morpho vault, according to an announcement on Wednesday.
“Morpho is a pioneer in permissionless DeFi protocols and consistently demonstrates a commitment to Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) principles,” the foundation wrote on X, explaining that both Morpho Vault v2 and Morpho Blue v1 were released under an open GPL2.0 license.
Facing criticism earlier this year over its routine sales of ETH to fund its operations, the non-profit Ethereum Foundation announced a plan to move a portion of its treasury into DeFi protocols, beginning with 50,000 ETH.
The foundation has since moved millions worth of funds onto platforms like Compound, an OG lending protocol, and Spark, part of the Sky (formerly MakerDAO) ecosystem. That said, it also continues to sell crypto assets for fiat on centralized exchanges to fund blockchain research and development.
According to Arkham Intelligence, the Ethereum Foundation holds over $820 million worth of crypto assets, including $735 million worth of ETH, at current prices, according to The Block’s ETH price page.
Founded in 2022, Morpho is a decentralized lending protocol on Ethereum that has become a popular institutional option. For instance, Coinbase recently surpassed $1 billion worth of bitcoin-backed onchain loan originations using Morpho, just eight months after the service launched.
Some $4.6 billion has been locked on Morpho Blue v1, a small fraction of the total Ethereum lending market, but in line with rivals like Compound, Spark, and older versions of Aave, according to The Block’s data.
