Morpho, DeFi’s second largest lending protocol by value locked, has officially renamed its long-in-development fixed-rate product Morpho Midnight.
Co-founder and CEO Paul Frambot announced the name today, April 14, on X, 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.
According to Frambots X-post, the distinction is structural. Morpho Blue offers pool-based markets with open term floating rates and external risk management. Midnight introduces fixed-term, fixed-rate intent-based markets, with external management of both risk and interest, another mechanism for setting prices and matching lenders and borrowers.
The two protocols will coexist and complement each other within the broader Morpho network, the X-post said. Frambot first marked the naming change of Morpho’s flat rate market in early March, when it dropped the version terminology (Markets V1/V2) in favor of different brand identities for each product.
Frambot added in today’s announcement that more details about Midnight are expected as security audits are completed.
Morpho currently holds approximately $7.7 billion in total value, according to DefiLlama data, making it the second-largest lending protocol in DeFi behind Aave with $26.3 billion in TVL.
Last June, The Defiant reported on Morpho’s V2 launch, which introduced fixed-rate, fixed-term lending, with the aim of bringing DeFi lending closer to the traditional financial structures that Midnight is now building on.
Last month, the Ethereum Foundation made its second deployment to Morpho Vaults, bringing the total stake to nearly $19 million and touting the protocol’s immutable, open source architecture as a model for cypherpunk-aligned DeFi infrastructure.
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