Morpho leads $11.3B curated DeFi market as five curators hold 69%

While Vaults.fyi and DeFiLlama published two reports that disagree on totals due to the fact that they count vaults and protocols differently, where they see eye-to-eye is that the market is greatly concentrated. 

Who are the top curators vaults.fyi identified? 

The vaults.fyi report, which is regarded as the widest survey of curated onchain markets so far, mapped $11.29 billion across 856 vaults, 131 curators and 18 protocols, with data current as of August 20. 

Results of the survey show that 69.3% of the measured market runs through just five curators.

Spreading deposits across several vaults does not spread the risk if one team runs all of them. A curator picks the markets, the collateral, the caps and the exposure limits. However, when five of them sit on top of two-thirds of the capital, the choices of a few people shape the risk that thousands of depositors carry.

Over the past year, the curated portion of the market climbed to 12.51% of supply-side DeFi TVL, up from 5.24%. The survey found that it expanded by 39% even as the broader supply-side market contracted 41.8%. 

Nearly half of all curated capital, about 46.2% of it, runs through Morpho across Ethereum-based chains and Solana, according to the report. The remaining 53.8% is split among 17 other protocols.

Morpho’s leading position comes from the system it helped build with Morpho Blue and MetaMorpho. The setup splits the basic lending function from the risk management side and allows outside managers to create separate lending markets and package them into single vaults.

This design is now attracting big traditional finance companies like Bitwise Asset Management, which has teamed up with Morpho to launch non-custodial vaults. The first product is aiming for a 6% yearly return. Bitwise also predicted that onchain vaults, which it calls “ETFs 2.0,” will double their assets under management in 2026.

The report also reveals that across the 25 largest Morpho stablecoin vaults, which hold $3.71 billion, bitcoin backs 54.1% of the lending. A depositor who thinks they hold a USDC position may, underneath, be lending against bitcoin, exposed to its liquidity, its oracle and the market’s ability to liquidate collateral in a crash.

Has Morpho always held the top position? 

Concrete and Sentora , which were not ranked twelve months ago, are now part of the current top five, with Concrete sitting at fourth now and Sentora at second. 

Usual dropped from fourth all the way to thirty-fourth. The report says the reshuffle is partly due to stress and points out that after problems tied to Stream and Resolv, weaker managers were washed out and money flowed to the teams that survived.

A separate DefiLlama study, which references Sentora data collected in July, tells the same concentration story. Using 55 tracked curators and a $7.18 billion total, it lists the top three curators as Steakhouse Financial ($2.03 billion), Sentora ($1.97 billion) and Gauntlet ($1.46 billion). Together, they control 75.9% of TVL, while the top five control 80.9%. 

The vaults.fyi report mentions that big players outside the crypto world are now getting into curated vaults. For instance, Apollo recently began working with Securitize, Midas teamed up with Fasanara, and JPMorganChase is launching tokenized money-market fund vaults. 

In May, the trading firm Wintermute also started its own curation platform called Armitage. Wintermute said it can accept types of collateral that other curators cannot, because it can handle liquidations on its own.

All this money is coming in despite TRM Labs recording 207 DeFi exploit incidents in the first half of 2026, more than double the 83 incidents recorded in the same period of 2025.