Coinbase has launched fixed-rate loans powered by decentralized lending protocol Morpho, giving borrowers a new way to tap cash without selling their Bitcoin. Announced Tuesday, the product lets users borrow USDC—the stablecoin issued by Circle—against their Bitcoin with both the interest rate and the repayment date locked in from the start. Morpho detailed the launch in a blog post.

The fixed-rate structure departs from the variable-rate model that has dominated on-chain lending, where borrowing costs float with market conditions and can climb unpredictably. With the new option, the rate stays constant for the life of the loan, giving users certainty over both the cost and the duration of their borrowing. That puts the product closer to the fixed-term credit long standard in conventional markets—mortgages and bonds, for instance, where cost and maturity are known upfront.

The rollout marks the first enterprise-scale deployment of Morpho Midnight, a newer version of the protocol built to support fixed rates and defined maturities, with loans priced and executed natively on the cryptocurrency network. Coinbase controls the user experience through its app, while Morpho provides the underlying credit infrastructure and settlement is handled on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network.

Morpho is a decentralized lending protocol that operates across multiple blockchain networks. The fixed-rate option sits alongside Coinbase's existing variable-rate loans, which are also powered by the protocol. The exchange first launched Bitcoin-backed borrowing on Base in early 2025, relying on Morpho as its technology provider, and that business has grown substantially: active loans now exceed $1.4 billion, backed by roughly $3 billion in collateral, according to Morpho.

Coinbase has steadily widened the offering since its debut. At one point it undercut rivals on servicing costs for U.S. borrowers, and it later expanded the collateral it accepts beyond Bitcoin to assets including XRP and Dogecoin.

The lending push has not been without turbulence, however. A sharp drop in Bitcoin and Ethereum prices in February drove record liquidations across Coinbase's loan book, underscoring the risk that comes with borrowing against volatile collateral. Locking in a rate fixes the cost of a loan, but it does not insulate borrowers from swings in the value of the asset backing it—a dynamic that remains in play as fixed-term borrowing scales.

Fixed rates and set repayment dates are foundational to traditional credit markets, and bringing them to a platform of Coinbase's size is a notable step for on-chain lending, which has largely run on variable rates until now. For borrowers, the structure brings the predictability of conventional loans into a crypto-native setting; for on-chain finance, it shows that open protocol infrastructure can now support credit products shaped like those in mainstream markets.

Morpho framed the speed of the build as evidence that fintechs can layer sophisticated credit products atop open infrastructure without reconstructing the underlying stack. While the integration begins with Bitcoin, the protocol is designed to eventually support tokenized stocks and other real-world assets, according to Morpho—a design path that points the same fixed-rate architecture beyond crypto collateral.