In DeFi, risk managers used to work almost for free. They stayed up late watching price feeds, changing loan settings by tiny amounts, and hoping the community noticed, while earning little more than some governance tokens. Morpho changed this by letting “curators” (risk teams) take a built-in share of all interest paid in the vaults they manage.
Now, a big stablecoin vault with a 15% average borrow rate and $2B in deposits can earn its curation team $3–6M per year in stablecoin fees. That’s enough to pay real salaries, build monitoring tools, and still leave strong profits. The top curators have turned into real businesses: they manage multiple vaults on different chains, hire analysts to stress-test liquidations, and work with oracle providers like Chainlink or RedStone to set up custom feeds. Monthly fee payouts for the leading teams now range from hundreds of thousands to over a million dollars, paid in USDC or ETH.
Because curators earn more when the vault is well used, they keep utilization high—often above 94%. They also handle liquidations very carefully, since bad debt would erase months of earnings. Borrowers gain from this alignment too. With high utilization and well-tuned risk settings, borrow rates are often lower than on native markets for the same collateral. For example, a wstETH loan that costs 8% elsewhere might be only 5–6% in a well-managed Morpho vault. That lower rate still covers the curator’s fee and saves borrowers a lot over time.
In October, the Morpho protocol itself started taking a small share of the curator fees. With around $14B in total deposits and growing, the protocol treasury now earns about $35M per year without printing new tokens. New products—like fixed-rate markets, private credit vaults, and automated rebalancing layers—use the same isolated vault design and plug into the same fee model.
Onchain risk management finally has a durable business model. Curators earn like partners in a hedge fund, borrowers pay less, lenders earn more, and the protocol builds real cash flow. The incentives line up cleanly, and so far the weekly data keeps backing that up.
