Morpho scores 7 points above Aave, led by oracle liquidation price and blast radius. Morpho ranks #3 and Aave #8 of 8 published lending & borrowing. Every term of the gap is on the ledger below; the inputs are on the audit receipt.
Morpho78
vs
AAAave71
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #3 and #8 of 8
Morpho scores 7 points above Aave, led by oracle liquidation price and blast radius.
Morpho #3 of 878
AAAave #8 of 871
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99; a bar is empty at 41 and full at 99.
Why, term by termMorpho leads on 2 of 4 published criteria; Aave on 0. The terms sum to the gap.
TermMorphoAaveWeightPoints
Oracle liquidation price7/106/107.7+2.0for Morpho+1.0 of 32
Blast radius9/106/105.8+4.5for Morpho+2.3 of 32
Net of the terms+6.5
Reproduced gap+6.5
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below7871+7.0
Weight is in points of the 86-point weighted total. Points are score points of the gap between the two.
MorphoScore 78A permissionless isolated-market primitive deployed on 14 chains where the oracle, the interest-rate model and the liquidation LLTV are chosen once at market creation and can never be changed — so Morpho publishes no deviation threshold and no heartbeat anywhere, but does publish, per market and continuously, the exact oracle contract that liquidates you, a documented degraded-state regime for when that oracle reverts, and the exact dollar figure of bad debt sitting in each market.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Before you supply, run Morpho's own bad-debt query with the listed filter OFF — and note that the filter, not the risk, is what changes. Morpho publishes a per-market outstanding bad-debt figure through https://api.morpho.org/graphql, which is more than most of this category does, but the curated view lies by omission: across the 590 markets Morpho marks listed, outstanding bad debt on 2026-08-17 was $0.00 against $4.42bn of borrows; drop that one flag and the same API at the same moment reports 27 markets carrying $255,015,878.47, every single one of them listed=false — $88.2M in wstUSR/USDC on Ethereum, $86.9M in xUSD/USDC on Arbitrum One, $28.8M in RLP/USDC and $23.0M in sdeUSD/USDC on World Chain, a chain on which Morpho has no listed markets at all. Morpho has published no post-mortem for any of it; its own newsletter for the month those losses formed (https://morpho.org/blog/morpho-effect-november-2025, 01 Dec 2025) does not contain the words 'bad debt', 'loss', 'deficit' or 'incident' once (fourteen such terms were checked, each zero times) and instead reports that "Curators are generating $300,000 in fees per week". The mechanism that produced those numbers is the one you are buying: Morpho does not choose oracles — "Market curators (not Morpho) are responsible for selecting and implementing appropriate oracles for their markets." — and it explicitly supports "Fixed-Price Oracles" that report a constant, so a collateral token can be marked at $1 in the contract while trading at five cents. Morpho documents exactly what happens if that feed REVERTS (borrow and liquidate stop, lenders and repaying borrowers can still exit) at https://docs.morpho.org/curate/concepts/security-considerations, but nothing at all catches a feed that keeps answering with the wrong number, and the kill switch that would is something the same page tells the CURATOR to build. Two smaller things to check before signing: if your vault was minted by the MetaMorpho Factory V1.1 it "do[es] not realize bad debt", so its share price will look clean while a loss sits inside it and the first person out is paid at your expense; and on three of the four largest Ethereum Vault V2s — which share one curator address and one owner address and held ~$1.05bn between them on 2026-09-28 — setPerformanceFee and setManagementFee carry a 0-second timelock, so the 50%-of-yield and 5%-of-assets caps can be reached with no notice at all, whatever the docs say about "a window to exit".AaveScore 71The reference shared-pool money market: it publishes the loss waterfall, the risk-steward mandate and its own incident arithmetic in more detail than anyone in the category, and publishes no deviation threshold or heartbeat anywhere for the price that actually liquidates you.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Read the April 2026 rsETH incident report before you supply anything to a WETH reserve — https://governance.aave.com/t/rseth-incident-report-april-20-2026/24580 — but read it together with its 2026-05-09 sequel, because the outcome was better than the report's models. An exploit entirely outside Aave (a 1-of-1 DVN bridge on someone else's LRT) put 89,567 rsETH ($221.39M) of collateral into Aave markets against $190.86M of WETH borrows. LlamaRisk modelled $123.7M-$230.1M of bad debt landing on ordinary WETH suppliers by reserve write-down — but those were explicitly labelled hypothetical scenarios, and per https://governance.aave.com/t/direct-to-aip-weth-unfreeze-and-ltv-restoration-across-aave-v3-instances/24878 the attacker's Aave positions were liquidated on 2026-05-06, all 89,567 rsETH was recovered, and the residual was covered by the DeFi United coalition. What you should still price is the machinery the event exposed, which has not changed: the Umbrella backstop covers Ethereum Core only and was PAUSED rather than drawn, so an Arbitrum, Base or Mantle supplier has no backstop at all; every affected WETH reserve sat at 100% utilisation with "idle balances below $20 on every chain", meaning a supplier with a perfectly healthy position could not withdraw; and the collateral that caused it was priced by an oracle whose deviation threshold and heartbeat appear nowhere in Aave's 91-page documentation corpus. None of this appears on https://aave.com/security, which still says "zero bad debt".
Quick facts
At a glance
3 of 4 rows read the same for both.
FactMorphoAave
PricingSnapshotA Morpho depositor's cost is the vault curator's fee. The Vault V2 page (https://docs.morpho.org/learn/concepts/vault-v2/, fetched 28 September 2026) caps it: "Supports both a performance fee (up to 50% on yield) and a management fee (up to 5% on total assets)." Live values are API fields, not page text: https://api.morpho.org/graphql on 28 September 2026 returned performanceFee 0 and managementFee 0.009999999973584 on Paypal USD Main, 0.1 and 0 on Sentora RLUSD Main, and 0.15 and 0 on Sentora PRIME Main - three of the four largest Ethereum Vault V2s. On all three the setPerformanceFee and setManagementFee timelocks read 0 seconds, so the curator can change the fee without notice. Supply rates float with each market's AdaptiveCurveIRM, so no fixed APY is quoted.Aave charges no deposit or curator fee; suppliers earn borrower interest net of each reserve's reserve factor, and both rates float on a two-slope utilisation curve. The Interest Rate Strategy page (https://aave.com/docs/aave-v3/smart-contracts/interest-rate-strategy, fetched 28 September 2026): "Implements the calculation of the interest rates depending on the reserve state. The model of interest rate is based on two slopes" around the OPTIMAL_USAGE_RATIO kink. Aave's docs carry no live values (https://aave.com/docs/resources/parameters still shows only an SDK pointer); the numbers are published per change on the governance forum. LlamaRisk's Risk Steward post of 28 September 2026 (https://governance.aave.com/t/risk-stewards-cap-and-irm-changes-on-aave-v3-2026-09-28/25718) gives USDT on Aave V3 Core: "At the current 92.8% utilization, the post-change variable borrow rate would be 4.34% APR, down from 4.39% under the current IRM, and the supply rate would be 3.63% APR, down from 3.67%." It also states the protocol's take on one asset: "the 25% reserve factor that applies to USDe on all five reserves". Rates reprice every block with utilisation; these are point-in-time figures, not a quote.
Asset coverageEditorial——
Region fitSnapshotglobalglobal
Custody modelEditorialNon-custodial: no company holds the coinsNon-custodial: no company holds the coins
From the published criteria
Which should you pick?
Morpho
78#3 of 8
Leads
Pick it when
Pick Morpho if oracle liquidation price matters most — it scores 7/10 to Aave's 6/10 there (weight 32).
Strength
Rate authorship — 9/10
Tradeoff
Before you supply, run Morpho's own bad-debt query with the listed filter OFF — and note that the filter, not the risk, is what changes. Morpho publishes a per-market outstanding bad-debt figure through https://api.morpho.org/graphql, which is more than most of this category does, but the curated view lies by omission: across the 590 markets Morpho marks listed, outstanding bad debt on 2026-08-17 was $0.00 against $4.42bn of borrows; drop that one flag and the same API at the same moment reports 27 markets carrying $255,015,878.47, every single one of them listed=false — $88.2M in wstUSR/USDC on Ethereum, $86.9M in xUSD/USDC on Arbitrum One, $28.8M in RLP/USDC and $23.0M in sdeUSD/USDC on World Chain, a chain on which Morpho has no listed markets at all. Morpho has published no post-mortem for any of it; its own newsletter for the month those losses formed (https://morpho.org/blog/morpho-effect-november-2025, 01 Dec 2025) does not contain the words 'bad debt', 'loss', 'deficit' or 'incident' once (fourteen such terms were checked, each zero times) and instead reports that "Curators are generating $300,000 in fees per week". The mechanism that produced those numbers is the one you are buying: Morpho does not choose oracles — "Market curators (not Morpho) are responsible for selecting and implementing appropriate oracles for their markets." — and it explicitly supports "Fixed-Price Oracles" that report a constant, so a collateral token can be marked at $1 in the contract while trading at five cents. Morpho documents exactly what happens if that feed REVERTS (borrow and liquidate stop, lenders and repaying borrowers can still exit) at https://docs.morpho.org/curate/concepts/security-considerations, but nothing at all catches a feed that keeps answering with the wrong number, and the kill switch that would is something the same page tells the CURATOR to build. Two smaller things to check before signing: if your vault was minted by the MetaMorpho Factory V1.1 it "do[es] not realize bad debt", so its share price will look clean while a loss sits inside it and the first person out is paid at your expense; and on three of the four largest Ethereum Vault V2s — which share one curator address and one owner address and held ~$1.05bn between them on 2026-09-28 — setPerformanceFee and setManagementFee carry a 0-second timelock, so the 50%-of-yield and 5%-of-assets caps can be reached with no notice at all, whatever the docs say about "a window to exit".
AA
Aave
71#8 of 8
Pick it when
Aave leads Morpho on no published criterion and no score dimension — pick it only if a fact outside the score (country, funding rail, custody) decides for you.
Strength
Rate authorship — 9/10
Tradeoff
Read the April 2026 rsETH incident report before you supply anything to a WETH reserve — https://governance.aave.com/t/rseth-incident-report-april-20-2026/24580 — but read it together with its 2026-05-09 sequel, because the outcome was better than the report's models. An exploit entirely outside Aave (a 1-of-1 DVN bridge on someone else's LRT) put 89,567 rsETH ($221.39M) of collateral into Aave markets against $190.86M of WETH borrows. LlamaRisk modelled $123.7M-$230.1M of bad debt landing on ordinary WETH suppliers by reserve write-down — but those were explicitly labelled hypothetical scenarios, and per https://governance.aave.com/t/direct-to-aip-weth-unfreeze-and-ltv-restoration-across-aave-v3-instances/24878 the attacker's Aave positions were liquidated on 2026-05-06, all 89,567 rsETH was recovered, and the residual was covered by the DeFi United coalition. What you should still price is the machinery the event exposed, which has not changed: the Umbrella backstop covers Ethereum Core only and was PAUSED rather than drawn, so an Arbitrum, Base or Mantle supplier has no backstop at all; every affected WETH reserve sat at 100% utilisation with "idle balances below $20 on every chain", meaning a supplier with a perfectly healthy position could not withdraw; and the collateral that caused it was priced by an oracle whose deviation threshold and heartbeat appear nowhere in Aave's 91-page documentation corpus. None of this appears on https://aave.com/security, which still says "zero bad debt".
Self-identify in 10 seconds
Which one is actually for you?
MorphoLeads
Choose Morpho if oracle liquidation price matters most
Oracle liquidation price: 7/10 against 6/10 for Aave (weight 32)
Blast radius: 9/10 against 6/10 for Aave (weight 24)
MorphoScore 78A permissionless isolated-market primitive deployed on 14 chains where the oracle, the interest-rate model and the liquidation LLTV are chosen once at market creation and can never be changed — so Morpho publishes no deviation threshold and no heartbeat anywhere, but does publish, per market and continuously, the exact oracle contract that liquidates you, a documented degraded-state regime for when that oracle reverts, and the exact dollar figure of bad debt sitting in each market.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Before you supply, run Morpho's own bad-debt query with the listed filter OFF — and note that the filter, not the risk, is what changes. Morpho publishes a per-market outstanding bad-debt figure through https://api.morpho.org/graphql, which is more than most of this category does, but the curated view lies by omission: across the 590 markets Morpho marks listed, outstanding bad debt on 2026-08-17 was $0.00 against $4.42bn of borrows; drop that one flag and the same API at the same moment reports 27 markets carrying $255,015,878.47, every single one of them listed=false — $88.2M in wstUSR/USDC on Ethereum, $86.9M in xUSD/USDC on Arbitrum One, $28.8M in RLP/USDC and $23.0M in sdeUSD/USDC on World Chain, a chain on which Morpho has no listed markets at all. Morpho has published no post-mortem for any of it; its own newsletter for the month those losses formed (https://morpho.org/blog/morpho-effect-november-2025, 01 Dec 2025) does not contain the words 'bad debt', 'loss', 'deficit' or 'incident' once (fourteen such terms were checked, each zero times) and instead reports that "Curators are generating $300,000 in fees per week". The mechanism that produced those numbers is the one you are buying: Morpho does not choose oracles — "Market curators (not Morpho) are responsible for selecting and implementing appropriate oracles for their markets." — and it explicitly supports "Fixed-Price Oracles" that report a constant, so a collateral token can be marked at $1 in the contract while trading at five cents. Morpho documents exactly what happens if that feed REVERTS (borrow and liquidate stop, lenders and repaying borrowers can still exit) at https://docs.morpho.org/curate/concepts/security-considerations, but nothing at all catches a feed that keeps answering with the wrong number, and the kill switch that would is something the same page tells the CURATOR to build. Two smaller things to check before signing: if your vault was minted by the MetaMorpho Factory V1.1 it "do[es] not realize bad debt", so its share price will look clean while a loss sits inside it and the first person out is paid at your expense; and on three of the four largest Ethereum Vault V2s — which share one curator address and one owner address and held ~$1.05bn between them on 2026-09-28 — setPerformanceFee and setManagementFee carry a 0-second timelock, so the 50%-of-yield and 5%-of-assets caps can be reached with no notice at all, whatever the docs say about "a window to exit".
AAAave
Aave leads Morpho on no published criterion
Choose it only if something outside the published criteria decides for you — your country, a funding rail, or custody.
AaveScore 71The reference shared-pool money market: it publishes the loss waterfall, the risk-steward mandate and its own incident arithmetic in more detail than anyone in the category, and publishes no deviation threshold or heartbeat anywhere for the price that actually liquidates you.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Read the April 2026 rsETH incident report before you supply anything to a WETH reserve — https://governance.aave.com/t/rseth-incident-report-april-20-2026/24580 — but read it together with its 2026-05-09 sequel, because the outcome was better than the report's models. An exploit entirely outside Aave (a 1-of-1 DVN bridge on someone else's LRT) put 89,567 rsETH ($221.39M) of collateral into Aave markets against $190.86M of WETH borrows. LlamaRisk modelled $123.7M-$230.1M of bad debt landing on ordinary WETH suppliers by reserve write-down — but those were explicitly labelled hypothetical scenarios, and per https://governance.aave.com/t/direct-to-aip-weth-unfreeze-and-ltv-restoration-across-aave-v3-instances/24878 the attacker's Aave positions were liquidated on 2026-05-06, all 89,567 rsETH was recovered, and the residual was covered by the DeFi United coalition. What you should still price is the machinery the event exposed, which has not changed: the Umbrella backstop covers Ethereum Core only and was PAUSED rather than drawn, so an Arbitrum, Base or Mantle supplier has no backstop at all; every affected WETH reserve sat at 100% utilisation with "idle balances below $20 on every chain", meaning a supplier with a perfectly healthy position could not withdraw; and the collateral that caused it was priced by an oracle whose deviation threshold and heartbeat appear nowhere in Aave's 91-page documentation corpus. None of this appears on https://aave.com/security, which still says "zero bad debt".
Criterion by criterion
Scorecard
Published criteria · weight in points of 868 of 8 cells scored. Strength is read from the evidence file; the weight is the published one. Methodology
Oracle liquidation price
by 1 of 10weight 7.7 of 86Morpho leads
Morpho7/10 out of 10
Aave6/10 out of 10
Rate authorship
weight 5.8 of 86Tie
Morpho9/10 out of 10
Aave9/10 out of 10
Blast radius
by 3 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Morpho leads
Morpho9/10 out of 10
Aave6/10 out of 10
Shortfall record
weight 4.8 of 86Tie
Morpho7/10 out of 10
Aave7/10 out of 10
Score dimensions
weights sum to 86
The published score is five dimensions, each weighted for the category. "Published criteria" is the criteria block above; the other four are the engine's own terms — availability, friction, trust record, measured data. Each bar is one side's points out of that dimension's maximum; the weight beside the name is its points of the 86-point weighted total. The published criteria above can fill 24 of the block’s 30. A weight marked “constant here” belongs to a dimension every ranked product in the category holds at the same value: it still counts in the total, and it orders nothing here.
Availabilityweight 20 of 86 · constant here
Morpho14/20Aave14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Morpho19.1/30Aave16.6/30
Morpho leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Morpho2.7/10Aave2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Morpho3.2/8Aave3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Morpho8.3/18Aave8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order
Choose Morpho unless the term Aave leads on is the one you are buying.
Aave leads Morpho on no published criterion and no score dimension — pick it only if a fact outside the score (country, funding rail, custody) decides for you.
The published order weighs every criterion the same way for everyone. To weigh them your way, run .
From the published order
Next best action
If this isn't your case
Other matchups worth comparing
How you can lose money here, and what the ranking scores
Control failure: a key or vote changes the rules, freezes or mints.
Scored by Who sets your rate — a utilisation curve or a curator? · 24% (Morpho 9/10, Aave 9/10)
Oracle failure: a wrong price or outcome liquidates or settles a position.
Scored by What price gets you liquidated, and how far can it drift? · 32% (Morpho 7/10, Aave 6/10)
Insolvency failure: the firm or issuer that owes you cannot pay.
Scored by If one market goes bad, how much of yours goes with it? · 24% (Morpho 9/10, Aave 6/10)
Scored by Has it lost lender money before, and did it publish it? · 20% (Morpho 7/10, Aave 7/10)
Not assessed by this ranking: Contract failure, Regulatory failure, Execution failure, Exit failure. A high place says nothing about these; the Methodology tab says what each means.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Morpho scores 7 points above Aave, led by oracle liquidation price and blast radius. Published scores, out of 100: Morpho 78 (rank 3 of 8 lending & borrowing), Aave 71 (rank 8 of 8).
Reviewed means both products compared here was read against its sources on or after that date; every ranked category is re-read at least every 45 days. Models research, extract and parse. A deterministic engine ranks. Every quote passes an adversarial refute pass.
Answer a few quick questions and get one clear recommendation based on how you actually plan to use crypto — with rationale, tradeoffs, and a path to monitor the decision.
No signup·Free first pass · Private·No spam · No account
Not financial advice · Independent · Always do your own research
Not financial advice · For informational purposes only · Always do your own research
Morpho #3 of 878