Borrowers paid $170M interest
Morpho borrowers paid about $170 million in interest over the past year, according to protocol revenue summaries. Reporting also notes that Aave generated more revenue while trading at a roughly $1.5 billion valuation in comparative metrics (livebitcoinnews.com).
Morpho users paid roughly $170 million in borrowing costs over the last year, even though the protocol itself currently keeps little to none of that money. (defillama.com) Morpho is a decentralized lending market: depositors supply crypto, borrowers post collateral, and smart contracts set rates and liquidate risky positions automatically. Morpho’s own dashboard showed about $4.00 billion in active loans, $7.54 billion in total value locked, and $138.4 million in annualized interest on April 13, 2026. (data.morpho.org) DefiLlama’s cumulative quarterly figures for Morpho V1 add up to about $171.3 million in gross protocol revenue from the second quarter of 2025 through the first quarter of 2026, almost all of it listed as borrow interest. The same page labels that “cost of revenue,” with protocol revenue and token-holder income at $0. (defillama.com) That accounting split is the key to the comparison with Aave. DefiLlama shows Aave V3 generated $197.1 million in gross protocol revenue in the first quarter of 2026 alone and $24.9 million in gross profit after costs in that quarter. (defillama.com) Market pricing put the two tokens in a similar range in early April. CoinMarketCap recorded Aave’s market capitalization at $1.51 billion on April 1, 2026, while DefiLlama listed Morpho’s fully diluted valuation at about $1.66 billion on April 13, 2026. (coinmarketcap.com) (defillama.com) Morpho’s setup helps explain why borrower payments and protocol income diverge. Morpho’s documentation says Vaults V2 let curators collect fees from interest inside vault smart contracts, while third-party explainers note the protocol’s own fee switch exists but is not currently turned on. (docs.morpho.org) (exponential.fi) Token Terminal describes Morpho as infrastructure that lets developers and businesses build custom lending products on top of its markets. That model has helped it scale deposits and loans without yet converting much of borrower interest into treasury income for the protocol token. (tokenterminal.com) (data.morpho.org) Investors have kept backing that growth story. Morpho said on August 1, 2024 that it raised $50 million in a round led by Ribbit Capital to expand the network and push further decentralization. (morpho.org) The result is a clean split in decentralized lending right now: Morpho is handling billions of dollars in loans and interest flows, while Aave is still turning more of those flows into protocol-level revenue. (data.morpho.org) (defillama.com)
