Institutional Demand Emerges, On-Chain Fixed-Rate Lending May Experience a Real Turning Point
Morpho launches a fixed-rate protocol, marking a true turning point for on-chain lending.
Written by: Heechang Kang
Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
The scale of on-chain lending has reached approximately $60 billion (currently down to about $40 billion), but almost all of it still operates at floating rates. At the beginning of 2026, among the approximately $25 billion in active loans on major lending protocols, over 95% are variable rates with no maturity date. In contrast, fixed terms are the norm off-chain—corporate bonds, mortgages, and trade financing are no exceptions, generating about $200 trillion in credit annually.
On-chain fixed-rate lending has previously failed, but the borrowers who truly need fixed terms have now arrived.
Why did fixed-rate lending fail in the past?
When Yield Protocol, Notional V2, and Element launched, almost all lending demand was speculative and short-term. Speculators wanted leverage to open and close positions at any time, making it nearly worthless for them to pay a premium to lock in rates. Yield Protocol shut down in 2023, concluding that demand could not support the business.
Fixed-term instruments further deepened the demand issue: lenders' funds were locked up, while floating pools like Aave could offer similar yields with immediate withdrawal options, leaving lenders rarely compensated for choosing fixed rates. Liquidity was dispersed across each maturity date and collateral mix, leading to thin order books and huge spreads, ultimately pushing users back to floating pools.
What has changed?
The borrower base has changed. Institutions, corporate treasuries, and tokenized credit funds are entering the on-chain market on a large scale. These entities need to plan cash flows and require certainty in financing costs. Morpho, as the second-largest lending protocol (with deposits exceeding $7 billion), has determined that this demand is now mature and launched the fixed-rate protocol Midnight on Base in July 2026.
The use cases are very specific: trading companies cannot bear sudden spikes in funding costs while financing inventory; corporate treasuries need to borrow USD against BTC collateral and must report fixed interest expenses; tokenized private credit funds need to match asset yields with liability costs; market makers require financing rates that are themselves part of the trade when financing delta-neutral ledgers.
The supply side has also matured. Treasury management has become a professional industry, with companies like Gauntlet, Steakhouse, and Avantgarde managing interest rates and duration risks for passive depositors. The direction of U.S. regulation—including discussions on the CLARITY Act and SEC Commissioner Peirce's framework on treasuries and on-chain lending—is giving institutional allocators more confidence.
Design
Once demand is in place, the design question becomes: how does a venue discover fixed rates? Morpho Midnight answers this with an intent-based order book—participants place orders for credit units and debt units, which mirror zero-coupon obligations, with implied rates forming at the intersections of these orders. Orders do not lock up funds but only draw liquidity at settlement, allowing a market maker to quote multiple markets and multiple maturity dates from a single balance.
Because Morpho exposes this order book as open infrastructure, upper-layer platforms can specialize on top of it. Tenor is built directly on Morpho, adding a policy layer that allows participants to attach custom terms to shared liquidity, including whitelist counterparties, customized OTC agreements for collateral and rates, and automatic renewals or fallback to floating rates at maturity. The same layer also allows fintech companies and exchanges to run their own crypto collateral loan programs without needing to build separate venues.
Term Finance addresses the same rate discovery issue with a different temporal choice: concentrating activity in periodic sealed-bid auctions, where both parties submit hidden bids, setting a clearing rate for each maturity date.
Thus, the two mechanisms balance between rate quality and availability: auctions concentrate liquidity and produce robust clearing prices but only at scheduled times; continuous order books can execute at any time but rely on active market makers to maintain liquidity.
-- Price
Demand is Coming
The collateral base requiring term credit is moving on-chain. Tokenized real-world assets reached approximately $29 billion in Q1 2026, growing about 30% in a single quarter; BlackRock's tokenized treasury fund BUIDL surpassed $2.8 billion and began trading on Uniswap in February 2026. Tokenized stocks and commodities are following the scaling of treasury bonds, with the vast majority of asset holders being institutions that finance their positions with fixed terms.
These flows will compound into credit demand: fintech rails are boosting stablecoin float, tokenization is moving institutional collateral on-chain, and institutions holding these collaterals are borrowing at known costs on fixed calendars. On-chain credit currently stands at about $60 billion, still just a small fraction of the approximately $200 trillion in credit origination off-chain each year, indicating that the addressable gap is structural.
The previous cycle was driven by speculators who were not interested in rate certainty because they could close positions at any time. The capital entering this cycle comes from tokenized collateral and fintech distribution, belonging to treasuries, funds, and payment companies, whose financing needs recur on fixed calendars.
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