MORPHO · the coin count is frozen. The ownership is not.
MORPHO is the governance token of the Morpho lending network on Ethereum — 688.43M circulating out of a fixed 1B that was minted once and never added to. It ships as two contracts: a non-transferable legacy token, and the wrapped token the market actually trades. Coins become tradable only when a holder converts them, so the number that moves here is not supply — it is who owns it.
Sell pressure. Nothing was issued, yet 13.42M MORPHO reached the market in 90 days: 9.14M paid out of the Morpho Association treasury, 2.99M of rewards actually claimed, and 1.29M of locked coins turning tradable.
Buy pressure. Empty. No buyback, no burn, no staking lock — and the lending fee switch that could fund any of them has never been turned on, so the buy side is a clean 0.
Net. About +1.95% to market over 90 days and the same again forward, with nothing on the other side of the ledger. The real story is the queue behind it: 304.00M in the governance treasury and 391.06M still un-converted.
Nothing was issued. Both MORPHO contracts returned the same total supply at the open and the close of the window, down to the smallest unit, so the coin count did not move at all. The 1B ceiling is a governance promise rather than a locked limit: the live token sits behind an upgradeable proxy whose owner multisig can still mint.
Locked MORPHO only becomes tradable when its holder converts it through the migration wrapper, and 1.29M did so in 90 days. The wrapper still escrows 391.06M, so what actually released is roughly a tenth of the paper calendar — founder coins run to May 17 2028 and the third strategic-partner tranche to Nov 21 2027.
The Morpho Association paid out 9.14M of tradable MORPHO across 65 transfers and still holds 103.83M. Three overhangs sit behind it: the governance treasury holds 304.00M, of which 290.42M has never been converted and did not move once all window; the migration wrapper escrows 391.06M; and the reward wallets hold 4.97M funded but unclaimed. An approved 150M grant to the Association has not moved on chain.
There is no estate, no trustee and no court-ordered distribution attached to MORPHO. Nothing sits under a lock that a schedule could force open, so this row has never carried a figure.
Rewards are pulled by users, not pushed by the protocol. Governance topped the reward wallets up with 6.00M inside the window and 3.01M of that is still sitting there unclaimed, so 2.99M is what actually reached holders.
There is no buyback. The lending fee switch that could pay for one has never been turned on, so the protocol takes no revenue it could spend on its own token.
There is no burn path at all. The unspendable address held the same 7.18 MORPHO at both ends of the window and neither contract's total supply moved, so nothing was destroyed on either surface.
Every Morpho wallet was a net sender. The governance treasury's unconverted holding never moved and its second-chain balance was flat with zero transfers, so no team wallet bid for the token.
No lock contract was deployed, and MORPHO has no staking and no vote-escrow. A large institutional buyer holds an agreement to accumulate up to 90M over four years under transfer restrictions, but no dated tranche, wallet or amount has ever been disclosed, so nothing is booked here.
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