Wall Street stocks are getting another life on-chain. Coinbase tokenized stocks can now be used as collateral for USDC loans on Morpho, allowing holders to borrow against their positions without selling them.
The new markets are live on Base, where Morpho supports borrowing against five Coinbase-issued stock tokens: Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta Platforms and SpaceX. Borrowers can choose between variable-rate lending markets and a fixed-rate layer, although the fixed side has yet to attract any loans.
The idea is simple enough. Instead of selling a tokenized stock to access dollars, a holder can pledge the position and borrow USDC against it. In practice, that turns an equity-like asset into something much closer to conventional DeFi collateral.
The move also adds another layer to Coinbase’s experiment with tokenized equities. The exchange began issuing the tokens in August for users outside the United States, with the assets held in self-custodial wallets rather than traditional brokerage accounts.
Coinbase Tokenized Stocks Meet DeFi Lending
Five markets went live on Sept. 7, and activity remained tiny at first. Borrowing stayed below $600 until Sept. 16, when outstanding loans jumped from $503 to $42,105 in roughly two hours.
Since then, borrowing has climbed to $54,652. Morpho’s data showed $104,401 worth of stock tokens pledged as collateral, while $60,265 had been supplied across the five markets at 9:48 a.m. ET.
Steakhouse Financial curates all five markets. Its two Steakhouse High Yield USDC vaults provide 98.9% of the liquidity in the largest market, illustrating how concentrated the early supply side remains.
The five assets are AAPLc, GOOGLc, NVDAc, METAc and SPCXc. Coinbase’s Base stocks page lists five additional tokenized equities — Amazon, Microsoft, Strategy, SanDisk and Tesla — but none currently has a Morpho lending market.
Risk parameters vary by asset. Apple, Nvidia, Meta and SpaceX use a liquidation loan-to-value ratio of 62.5%, while Alphabet is set at 77%.
That difference matters because the collateral ratio determines how much debt can be taken against an asset before liquidation becomes possible. The Apple market, for instance, applies a 12.67% liquidation penalty.
So far, there has been no liquidation in the Apple market. Its largest borrower holds 113.46 AAPLc against a $20,360 USDC loan, with a reported health factor of 1.17.
The fixed-rate side tells a different story. Morpho’s Midnight layer has 19 USDC markets for each of the five stocks, creating 95 fixed-rate markets in total. Maturities range across dates from daily offerings through Sept. 30 to longer terms extending to March 26, 2027, alongside an open-ended option for each token.
Every one of those fixed-rate markets currently shows zero units outstanding.
For now, borrowers are sticking with variable rates, and those rates can move sharply with demand.
Apple, Alphabet and Nvidia are sitting at 90% utilization, the target built into their interest-rate models. Borrowers in those markets pay 5.62%, while lenders receive 5.06%.
Meta is running hotter, with 97% utilization. Once utilization moves beyond the target, the rate curve steepens, pushing the borrowing rate to 17.52% and the lending rate to 16.98%.
The collateral itself is priced through Chainlink. Each Morpho market reads a Chainlink feed through Morpho’s Chainlink V2 oracle adapter, giving the protocol an on-chain reference for the stock tokens.
For Apple, the Chainlink feed showed $335.49 at 1:42 p.m. UTC on Friday, compared with $337.52 for the token on DeFiLlama.
There is also a regulatory boundary around the entire setup. Morpho said the stock-backed markets are “not available to US persons or persons in other restricted jurisdictions.”
The restrictions are attached to the tokenized assets rather than the market contracts themselves. Coinbase issues the stocks through Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd. under Abu Dhabi Global Market prospectuses, and the products are offered only outside the United States.
The numbers remain modest relative to the size of Morpho’s broader Base operation. The five tokenized stocks have about $11.4 million in outstanding supply on Base, while only $104,401 has been pledged on Morpho — less than 1% of the estimated pool.
Morpho itself holds $4.03 billion in deposits on Base and $10.42 billion across chains, according to DeFiLlama. Base’s stocks page also points users toward Aave and Euler as alternative places to borrow against the same tokens.
For now, the experiment is small and concentrated. But the mechanics are already clear: a token representing a public company can sit in a self-custodial wallet, move on a blockchain and, under the right restrictions, become collateral for a dollar-denominated DeFi loan.
That makes tokenized stocks more than a way to put equities on-chain. They are beginning to plug into the financial machinery that grew around crypto in the first place.