Morpher

With an average annual revenue of USD 500 billion and an estimated USD 558 trillion in stocks, forex, and derivatives contracts, the trading and investing industry is the biggest industry in the world. Despite its size and importance, trading remains burdensome, costly, and unfair.

The industry consists primarily of middlemen like banks, brokers, and index funds, who charge obscene fees for bad service. Despite paying high commissions, retail traders do not have access to important markets like real estate or commodities, can only trade during regular exchange hours, and have a hard time shorting the markets. Many traders from developing countries do not have access the world’s financial markets at all. While institutional investors usually enjoy universal access, they often face limited liquidity resulting in high transaction costs from slippage and market impact.

Morpher replaces middlemen like brokers, exchanges, and the counterparty of a trade with an incorruptible protocol on the Ethereum blockchain.

Morpher introduces an ERC20 Token (MPH) on the Ethereum blockchain that can be staked on the price development of a market, e.g. the Apple stock. If the market develops as predicted, the protocol mints new token proportionally and adds them to the user’s stake. If a prediction is incorrect, staked token are burned proportionally.

The protocol replicates the economics of trading any market on the blockchain, without actually trading the underlying stock, commodity, or currency.

Morpher went from idea to business under the peppery California sun. Our offices became the grassy courtyards spilled across the Stanford campus. Beyond scenic benches, Stanford attracts amazing guests. Tim Draper visited and shared his vision for blockchain technology completely changing the world. We couldn't agree more, and he became the first investor in Morpher. We scaled our operations and setup in beautiful Vienna. By summer 2019 we released the alpha version. Post alpha we built our own plasma-like scaling solution and migrated the entire trade engine to Ethereum smart contracts. Finally close to launch, we started an airdrop in early 2020 to reward our early users and distribute Morpher tokens as widely as possible.