Morpho Unveils Fixed-Rate Protocol Morpho Midnight

Morpho, DeFi’s second-largest lending protocol by value locked, has officially named its long-in-development fixed-rate product: Morpho Midnight.

Co-founder and CEO Paul Frambot announced the name on X today, April 14, emphasizing that Midnight is not a sequel to Morpho Blue. “It is a completely new paradigm for onchain lending, and should not be considered a ‘V2’ of Blue,” Frambot wrote.

The distinction is structural, according to Frambot’s X post. Morpho Blue offers pool-based, open-term variable-rate markets with externalized risk management. Midnight introduces intent-based, fixed-term, fixed-rate markets with externalized management of both risk as well as rate, a different mechanism for pricing and matching lenders and borrowers.

The two protocols will coexist and complement each other within the broader Morpho network, per the X post. Frambot first flagged the naming overhaul of Morpho’s fixed rate market in early March, when he dropped versioning terminology (Markets V1/V2) in favor of distinct brand identities for each product.
Frambot added in today’s announcement that more details on Midnight are expected as security audits finalize.

Morpho currently holds approximately $7.7 billion in total value locked, per data from DefiLlama, making it the second-largest lending protocol in DeFi, following Aave with $26.3 billion in TVL.

Last June, The Defiant reported on Morpho’s V2 launch, which introduced fixed-rate and fixed-term loans, with the aim to bring DeFi lending closer to traditional finance structures, which Midnight now builds on.

Last month, the Ethereum Foundation made its second deployment into Morpho Vaults, bringing its total commitment to nearly $19 million and citing the protocol’s immutable, open-source architecture as a model for cypherpunk-aligned DeFi infrastructure.

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