Base credit markets grow 31% to $2B in outstanding loans as utilization rates surge

Floating-rate credit markets on Base have quietly crossed a milestone that would have seemed ambitious a year ago. Outstanding loans on Coinbase’s Layer-2 network grew 31% year-over-year, climbing from roughly $1.7 billion to approximately $2.3 billion. The raw loan growth is impressive on its own. But the utilization numbers tell the more interesting story: capital efficiency jumped from 58% to 75%, meaning the money sitting in these lending pools is actually being put to work rather than collecting digital dust. Morpho emerges as Base’s lending backbone Much of this expansion traces back to Morpho, the lending protocol that has become the dominant engine of credit activity on Base. Morpho’s supplied liquidity on the network doubled over the past 12 months, rising from $1.0 billion to $2.1 billion. USDC borrowing alone doubled to $2.0 billion, with a utilization rate of 90%. The protocol hit $1 billion in active loans on Base by January 2026, representing roughly a 10x increase year-over-year at that point. By September 2025, active loans had already exceeded $2 billion, a 150% jump from the start of that year. Across all its deployments, Morpho’s aggregate active loans have appro...