Risk curator

The risk curator springs from a design decision: separating the lending protocol from risk management. Morpho's base layer, Morpho Blue, is a singleton, immutable and permissionless protocol. Each market is defined by five fixed parameters (loan token, collateral, oracle, interest-rate model and LLTV, the liquidation loan-to-value) that cannot be changed once the market is deployed. The curator never touches that layer and never sets the LLTV. The work happens in the vault layer above it.

Morpho vaults (MetaMorpho) are tokenized ERC-4626 vaults, with ERC-2612 permit support, that aggregate liquidity and spread it across several Morpho Blue markets. A vault has four roles. The owner controls governance and assigns the rest. The curator, acting as a chief risk officer, defines the investment thesis, enables or disables markets and sets the supply caps, the per-market exposure limits. The allocator rebalances funds across already enabled markets. And the guardian can revoke pending actions, lower caps or deallocate to mitigate risk.

The average depositor does not pick isolated markets one by one, they deposit into a curated vault. The curator is, in practice, the risk filter between the user and the permissionless markets, and their judgment on collaterals, oracles and caps determines the quality of the risk taken on. The vault contract defines which actions are subject to delay and veto. Active curators on Morpho include Gauntlet, Steakhouse Financial, Block Analitica and Re7 Labs. The MetaMorpho vault system launched in 2024.

Timelock duration and covered actions depend on vault version and configuration. A curator role does not guarantee loss-free operation.