EXCLUSIVE: @Morpho CEO @PaulFrambot on how Morpho Midnight is new infrastructure for institutional private credit. This week, Morpho launched Midnight, which enables fixed-rate, fixed-term onchain lending, starting with one cbBTC/USDC market on Base across multiple maturities. This is unlike most DeFi today, where protocols like Aave and Compound set your risk, rate, and term using their formulas. This is not ideal for large institutions with their own risk appetite. @Morpho Midnight hands risk, rate AND term to the open market, so investors can set their risk appetite, and borrowers can apply to meet that in the marketplace. Lending on Midnight means buying a claim on future cashflows, where you pay 0.95 today, receive 1.00 at maturity. The difference (discount) is your rate as a lender. That's exactly how a zero-coupon bond works, the primitive bond markets are built on. Some other nuances that came out in the interview Prior fixed-rate protocols split liquidity into a pool per maturity, so markets stayed thin and most died. This is how a bond desk runs a book. Morpho aims to ensure liquidity isn't fragmented into individual pools. It offers source funds only at fill, and one balance sheet can quote fixed rates across all maturities at once. So you quote once in many places. The fees are capped in the code with settlement at 50bps a year, a lender fee at 1%, and governance can *never* raise them. Infrastructure that can't reprice you is infrastructure a treasurer can underwrite. Wall St is coming to these DeFi protocols For example, Apollo (roughly $940bn AUM) is contracted to buy up to 9% of MORPHO supply over four years. So I sat down with Paul Frambot, Morpho's CEO, days after his most ambitious launch yet. DeFi lending reached tens of billions without a single maturity date. Now we find out what it builds with one.