After expanding stablecoin salary payouts to full-time employees a few weeks ago, global payroll platform Deel followed up yesterday with the launch of an in-app stablecoin wallet for contractors and its own dollar balance, DLUSD.
You can call it a pretty big deel.
With roughly $22 billion in annual payroll processed, Deel is one of the largest employers of record and global payroll platforms in the world.
Until now, its job mostly ended at the payout: money moved from employer to worker, and Deel’s role was getting it there. The new wallet changes that. Contractors can receive earnings in DLUSD and hold them inside Deel rather than routing funds straight to a bank or external wallet. Thanks to integrations with Morpho and Sentora, they can even earn rewards and soon spend funds via a Deel Visa card.
It’s basically a global dollar account, purpose-built for workers whose local currencies keep losing value. Unsurprisingly, the product went live in Argentina first, with the rest of Latin America, plus APAC, MENA, and Africa to follow.
So why does this matter beyond Deel?
Any company sitting on major payment flows or in-platform balances can follow the playbook: issue its own branded dollar, keep the economics, and stack yield, borrowing, and spending on top. Embedding financial services has never been easier.
It's great for consumers and quietly worrisome for traditional banks and many countries' capital controls.
In today’s Briefing:
New stablecoin consortium from Coinbase and others?
Morpho tackles fixed-term lending
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
Coinbase teams up with payments giants to form stablecoin consortium. According to The Information, the exchange is planning to team up with Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard to issue a new U.S. dollar stablecoin. 💸
Tether launches gold-backed payment card. The card will operate on the Visa network, allowing users to spend fiat at merchants worldwide while earning up to 6% cashback in XAU₮, Tether’s tokenized gold, on eligible transactions. 💳
Michael Saylor initiates first BTC sale since December 2022. According to a recent filing, Strategy sold 32 BTC for $2.5 million in May. The sale follows the company’s earlier indication that it may move away from Saylor’s longstanding “never sell” stance and actively manage its balance sheet when doing so strengthens its financial position. 📉
CFTC opens path for regulated crypto perpetuals in the U.S. The agency approved KalshiEX’s BTCPERP as a regulated bitcoin futures product and separately cleared a framework for Coinbase to offer certain Deribit crypto derivatives, including perpetuals, to U.S. customers under specified conditions. 🟢
Coinbase partners with Ethena. Starting next week, Ethena’s savings products will become available to Coinbase’s 100 million registered users. Coinbase Ventures also disclosed that it invested in ENA by purchasing tokens on the open market. 🤝
Galaxy launches institutional OTC desk for prediction markets. The firm announced its first $10 million Kalshi block trade with investment firm Arca on Tuesday. The offering gives institutional investors access to prediction market liquidity at scale, while allowing Galaxy to hedge event-driven positions across its broader trading operations, including equities and commodities. 💰
TOP STORY
Morpho Unveils “Midnight” Whitepaper to Scale Fixed-Term Lending Onchain
Whitepaper unveiled: Last week, lending platform Morpho released the whitepaper for its upcoming new protocol, Morpho Midnight. Designed to sit alongside Morpho Blue, which currently holds around $10 billion in deposits, Midnight is built to add fixed-rate, fixed-term credit markets to Morpho’s lending stack.
Why it matters: Today, well over 95% of the $25 billion in outstanding DeFi loans are floating-rate loans with no fixed expiry date. That model emerged from the early days of DeFi lending, when smart contracts began adjusting interest rates dynamically based on how much of a pool was being borrowed. While this structure works for retail- and crypto-native users, it does not fit the way institutional allocators evaluate credit exposure, which is one reason fixed-rate DeFi has become an increasingly active area of protocol development.
“Institutions have always operated around fixed inputs and defined terms. They are not going to rebuild their treasury operations around floating rates that vary against arbitrary curves and are unpredictable,” Merlin Egalite, Co-Founder of Morpho, told Blockstories.
Not the first attempt: Morpho is not the first protocol to pursue this opportunity. A first wave of fixed-term lending projects went live around 2021, and the category remains active today, with leading lending platforms such as Aave, Kamino, and Euler all working on fixed-term infrastructure of their own.
How Midnight works: One of Midnight’s key design features is that it separates the process of setting loan terms from the deployment of capital. Lenders specify the terms under which they are willing to lend, including collateral, rate, and duration. Borrowers do the same on the other side. A network of third-party bots then searches across these offers, and when a compatible match is found, the loan is created at the agreed terms.
Capital efficient: During the matching phase, lenders do not have to leave their capital idle. Until a suitable borrower appears, their funds can continue earning yield on Morpho Blue, leveraging Morpho’s existing network of curators and liquidity.
“A lender can earn variable yield on Blue while simultaneously quoting a fixed-rate offer on Midnight, and when a match happens the capital moves atomically in a single transaction,” Egalite noted.
Tradeable positions: Lenders are also not locked in until maturity. Each loan position is represented by a token that can be traded with other lenders and borrowers holding positions of the same maturity, giving lenders a way to exit early without waiting for the loan to mature.
Outlook: For now, Midnight’s exact launch timeline remains unclear, though the protocol is expected to roll out gradually over the coming weeks.
"We will be able to share more details soon, but you can expect Midnight to launch in a progressive rollout in the next few weeks, which will expand over time," Egalite told Blockstories.
Laurence Day is Co-Founder and CEO of Wildcat Labs, a major contributor to Wildcat, a DeFi protocol that enables onchain undercollateralized credit facilities without mandatory third-party oversight.
Why have fixed-rate lending markets historically struggled to scale in DeFi, and what does Morpho Midnight change?
Early fixed-term lending protocols such as Yield Protocol and Notional tried to solve fixed-rate lending through fixed-maturity claims and zero-coupon-style tokens. The designs were intellectually sound, but they ran into two practical bottlenecks.
The first was liquidity fragmentation. Every asset, maturity, and rate combination effectively created its own thin market. Quoting a rate also required capital to be locked into that specific market, which left books shallow and made rate discovery difficult.
The second was demand. Fixed-rate lending is useful, but its natural users are treasuries, funds, and professional allocators, many of which were not active onchain at scale until the recent institutional and RWA wave.
Midnight attempts to address the first problem by letting solvers and makers source liquidity more flexibly, while allowing lenders to quote markets without pre-locking capital. This taps into market-making infrastructure that already exists across onchain and offchain venues.
For larger-scale adoption, however, key primitives still need to mature in DeFi, particularly underwriting frameworks, credit-risk infrastructure, and credible KYB and credentialing rails.
David Vatchev is Head of Tokenization at Fasanara Capital, a leading institutional asset manager overseeing more than $5 billion in assets and the tokenized private credit fund mF-ONE.
What does fixed-rate lending unlock for onchain credit?
Fixed-rate lending moves DeFi credit closer to how institutional allocators already think: tenor, collateral, spread, maturity and liquidity.
Much of DeFi lending today is still based on variable rates and open-ended liquidity. That works for crypto-native users, but is harder for institutions to underwrite. Fixed-term markets make the exposure clearer: lenders know their target return, borrowers know their cost of capital, and both sides understand the maturity upfront.
This is especially relevant for RWA yield strategies and short-duration asset-backed finance. Assets such as invoices and receivables already have 30-, 60- or 90-day cashflows, with funding terms agreed for that period. Bringing that structure onchain creates a better match between the underlying asset, the capital commitment and expected liquidity.
It can also improve capital efficiency by matching capital to maturity more directly, rather than relying on pooled models that hold excess liquidity for unpredictable withdrawals.
The next step is proof in live markets: reliable rate formation, transparent collateral, clear redemption mechanics and enough data for institutions to underwrite with confidence.
Nuno Cortesão is Co-Founder and CEO at Zharta, a fixed-rate lending and RWA infrastructure protocol.
From someone who's building a fixed-rate protocol, what's still missing for broader institutional adoption beyond the core infrastructure layer?
From a technology perspective, the market already has enough infrastructure for the next phase of institutional adoption. Across protocols like Zharta, Morpho, Aave, Euler, Term Finance, and Wildcat, institutions can already test a broad range of fixed-rate and fixed-term lending models onchain.
The priority now is to let real usage shape the next layer of product development. Fixed-rate lending still needs to prove which structures institutions actually prefer, whether that means fully bespoke bilateral agreements, standardized maturities, liquid lender positions, or a combination of these models. That clarity can only emerge once more capital moves through these systems in production at scale.
Regulatory treatment remains the larger constraint. Hedge funds and more experimental allocators can already operate in today’s environment, but banks and larger financial institutions might need certainty around how these positions are classified, how risks should be managed, and how compliance obligations apply.
Institutional interest in onchain lending is rising, but actual participation remains limited, with institutions accounting for only ~6-10% of outstanding onchain loans.
In our latest field report, we map the institutional crypto lending stack and break down why institutions are slowly moving onchain, what barriers still limit broader adoption, and what infrastructure is being built to support the market’s next phase of growth.
Aave Labs: Finance Director (Push), Dublin 🇮🇪
Binance: Institutional Client Services (EU), Amsterdam 🇳🇱
BitGo: Managing Director, Head of EU Sales, London 🇬🇧
eToro: Product Manager - Crypto, Cyprus 🇨🇾
Kraken: Product Manager - Prop Trading - Breakout, Ireland 🇮🇪
Revolut: Product Owner (Crypto), Dublin 🇮🇪
Starknet Foundation: Business Development (Future Opportunities), Portugal 🇵🇹
Visa: Senior Manager, Crypto Specialized Sales & Solutioning (Europe), London 🇬🇧
Wintermute: Head of Strategy & Operations, London 🇬🇧
Zama: Sales, Growth & Strategy Lead, Paris 🇫🇷
Hypernova | $3 million | Pre-Seed : Proprietary trading platform built on top of Hyperliquid.
What do you think of today's briefing?
Disclaimer: The information provided in the Crypto Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.
