- Morpho went live with Morpho Midnight on Base mainnet, letting lenders and borrowers set their own rates, maturities and loan terms instead of relying on an algorithm.
- The first market covers cbBTC and USDC across several maturity dates, running alongside Morpho’s existing variable-rate pools.
- Morpho holds about US$7.56 billion in net deposits, roughly US$3.15 billion of it on Base.
Morpho launched a fixed-rate lending protocol called Midnight on Coinbase’s Base network on Tuesday, extending an on.chain credit platform that holds about US$7.56 billion (AU$10.81 billion) in deposits into loans with terms the two sides negotiate themselves.
Midnight matches loans through offers. Lenders and borrowers each propose an interest rate, a maturity and other terms, and a loan forms when competing offers meet. That produces a fixed obligation for a set period, so both sides know the cost and the yield at origination.
Most on-chain lending markets instead run floating rates that move with supply and demand across a shared pool, and rates can swing from block to block.
The first market covers cbBTC, Coinbase’s wrapped Bitcoin, and USDC, across several maturity dates. So each pair sits in its own isolated market, which contains any bad debt to that market, and the protocol is non-custodial.
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A Second Track Alongside Blue
Morpho’s existing product, Morpho Blue, offers open-ended, variable-rate pools. Midnight adds fixed terms alongside those pools, and chief executive Paul Frambot has described the two as complementary, with Blue handling floating-rate credit and Midnight the fixed-rate side.
Fixed rates and set maturities mirror how traditional lenders and borrowers price debt, which Morpho says makes financing more predictable for larger participants.
The company has pitched Midnight as a way to draw institutions further into decentralised finance, where floating rates have made cash-flow planning hard.
Morpho said it deliberately kept the launch small as part of a staged rollout that put security first, and completed several audits and formal verification before going live on mainnet. It released Midnight’s whitepaper and code in May and ran a beta before the public launch.
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