Introducing Api3-curated Vaults on Morpho

Hello Morpho community,

Api3 is excited to participate in Morpho as a curator, beginning with vaults focused on providing safe, capital-efficient liquidity to assets that are currently underserved by existing curator strategies.

Api3 enters curation from a structurally different position than most participants. We are an oracle provider by design. For years, our role in DeFi has been to operate and enforce the risk-critical price infrastructure that protocols rely on for pricing, liquidations, and solvency, often under adversarial conditions and during periods of extreme market stress.

In practice, this has meant that Api3 has already been performing many of the core functions of a curator, just without actively managing underlying capital. Morpho curation is therefore a natural extension of our existing responsibilities.


Relevant Experience

Api3 operates price infrastructure that directly determines when positions are liquidated and whether markets remain solvent under stress.

As an oracle provider, we sit on the fault line between market volatility and protocol solvency. Our price feeds directly trigger liquidations and act as the final safeguard against bad debt during stressed market conditions.

In practice, this means that Api3 is routinely responsible for:

  • Deciding whether an asset can be supported safely at all

  • Determining the level of price precision required for a given market

  • Defining update frequency, deviation thresholds, and fallback behavior

  • Operating through flash crashes, liquidity gaps, and adversarial trading conditions

Much of this work happens before capital is ever deployed. Protocols often approach us with aggressive or unconventional designs such as illiquid collateral, experimental assets, or narrow liquidation margins. Our role is to either make those designs robust or explicitly refuse support when risk cannot be contained.

This continuous process of evaluating assets, stress-testing assumptions, and translating market reality into enforceable parameters is directly analogous to the core responsibility of a curator. The difference is that, until now, Api3’s scope has stopped at oracle configuration rather than extending into capital allocation.

Morpho curation allows us to apply the same risk discipline end-to-end, from price formation, to liquidation behavior, to market construction itself.


Competitive Advantages as a Curator

Asset Support Without Oracle Availability Constraints

Api3 is not limited to the set of assets that a single oracle provider chooses to make available.

Through our first-party oracle model, we operate price feeds together with known data providers such as CoinGecko, NCFX, and others. This allows us to design and maintain feeds for assets that would otherwise be unsupported, subject to strict liquidity, market structure, and operational risk requirements.

As a result, we can curate markets for assets that are underserved by existing curators.

OEV-Driven Yield Generation

Api3’s ability to internalize OEV allows liquidation-related value that is traditionally lost to searchers to be recaptured and redirected.

Api3 has already operated searcher infrastructure for its markets for an extended period, including through recent market stress events. This provides us with practical experience in auction execution, liquidation dynamics, and adversarial conditions that directly apply to Morpho markets.

For Morpho, this internalized value can generate additional yield that other curators cannot access and can be used to boost markets or improve depositor outcomes without relying on subsidies or external incentives.

Precision Pricing and Partial Liquidations

Api3’s OEV-enabled update flow allows price feeds to update as granularly as needed, without being bound to fixed intervals or coarse heartbeat assumptions.

When combined with Morpho’s support for partial liquidations, this enables more precise liquidation thresholds, reduced over-liquidation risk, and improved safety margins for volatile assets. Together, these properties make it possible to support markets that would otherwise be uncuratable under traditional oracle and liquidation models.


Alignment and Capital Commitment

Api3 intends to deploy its own treasury capital into the vaults it curates.

This ensures direct economic alignment with depositors and the Morpho ecosystem. Risk decisions, parameter choices, and operational tradeoffs will be made with Api3’s own capital exposed alongside users, rather than purely in an advisory or third-party capacity.


Initial Specialization

Api3’s initial focus as a curator will be vaults that provide liquidity to assets that are currently underserved.

These are markets where risk is manageable but requires precision, where capital efficiency depends on oracle quality, and where traditional curator models struggle to operate safely. By combining oracle-native risk management, OEV-driven yield, and Morpho’s flexible liquidation mechanics, Api3 aims to expand the set of assets that can be supported responsibly on Morpho.


We look forward to engaging with the Morpho community on asset selection, market design, oracle configuration transparency, risk parameterization, and long-tail market support. We welcome feedback and discussion as we begin this next phase.

2 Likes