Morpho is a well-designed, leading lending and borrowing protocol with unique features that improve the traditional lending paradigm in a trustless, efficient, and scalable way. See its details here: Morpho Blue and how it enables our vision for DeFi lending. The Darwinia network is considering integrating Morpho into its parachain but is encountering a licensing issue. Morpho uses the Morpho Business License morpho-blue/LICENSE at main · morpho-org/morpho-blue · GitHub, which is not open-sourced and cannot currently be used in any Polkadot parachain. A proposal has been posted in the Morpho forum to request a grant for EVM-compatible parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Proposal
Several parachains already support EVM contracts, including Moonbeam, Acala, Astar, Darwinia, and Assethub (which will support EVM soon: Polkadot referenda 885). Regardless of which EVM compatibility solution they use, these parachains need to integrate popular DeFi protocols. This proposal suggests introducing the Morpho Blue License to Polkadot parachains and applying for treasury funding to cover the grant fee once. Any parachain able to integrate Morpho could then do so under this license. This is a mutually beneficial approach for Morpho and the Polkadot ecosystem, strengthening DeFi and attracting more users.
If accepted, the next step is to wait for Morpho’s response and create a clear grant specification for the treasury application.
Final Words
The goal is for all Polkadot parachains to benefit from shared basic infrastructure to lower barriers and build a stronger ecosystem. Feedback is welcome from both the community and Morpho.
It looks like you can reuse the majority of the code under the GPL2.0 license. Someone would need to create a new main (Morpho.sol) but that wouldn’t be very hard.
Hi @0xTaylor, I would like to point out that this discussion seems somewhat off-topic. The primary intention of this proposal is to seek a grant for Morpho Blue within the Polkadot ecosystem, which would be beneficial for its ecosystem growth.
Regarding the assertion that ‘I can simply implement morpho.sol,’ it is essential to recognize that ensuring the security of the contract involves extensive auditing, real-world funding tests, and formal verification. Currently, Morpho Blue ranks third in Total Value Locked (TVL) among Ethereum lending protocols, which serves as strong validation of its efficacy, supported by numerous audit reports, formal verification, and bounty programs.
From a business perspective, I agree, but from a developer’s view, licensing issues can be critical to adoption and future ecosystem growth. In this case, Morpho has a transition clause with some caveats on timing and only specifies a move to V.2 or later, which is not backward compatible with v.3. The existing proposal can address today’s issues, but it’s a good idea to work on a long-term solution with Morpho that fully enables the developer community to do what they do best - extend features and capabilities and innovate.
From our perspective, the decision will highly depend on both the amount (and structure) of the license fee, as well as the level of support to be required.
While the proposal refers to ‘Polkadot Parachains’, the scope is somewhat unclear. The level of support required from core contributors will depend on how many chains you plan to deploy Morpho Blue to, and this should be proportional to the amount of the license fee.
We believe it would be more efficient to have the discussion after clarifying these points.
Based on Morpho’s feedback, we first need to identify which parachains want to integrate with Morpho. Darwinia Network votes in favor. We also need more feedback from other EVM-compatible parachains, such as Acala, Moonbeam, Astar, Bifrost, and AssetHub, etc.