Morpho Borrowers Paid $170M Interest. Aave Made More.

Morpho borrowers paid $170M in interest over one year, Token Terminal data shows, outpacing Aave’s $140M revenue against a comparable $1.5B valuation.

DeFi lending is moving fast. And one protocol nobody was talking about two years ago just posted numbers that are turning heads across the space.

According to Token Terminal on X, borrowers on Morpho paid roughly $170M in interest over the past year. The data, pulled from Token Terminal’s own analytics dashboard, puts Morpho’s fee growth on a steep upward curve that only started accelerating around mid-2025.

The Number That Actually Matters Here

Here’s the catch though. Morpho’s total borrower interest sits at ~$170 million for the year. But the protocol itself, assuming a 10% take rate, would have captured only about 17 million dollars in actual DAO revenue. That’s against a valuation Token Terminal placed at roughly $1.7 billion.

Aave, by contrast, generated close to $140M in annual revenue directly. Against a ~$1.5B valuation. Same ballpark market cap. Nearly ten times the revenue capture.

Token Terminal shared the comparison directly on X, framing it as a signal of where DeFi lending growth is coming from and what that growth actually means in revenue terms. The data visible on the Morpho metrics page shows cumulative fees crossing $312.7M over three years, with the sharpest jump happening in the final 12 months.

So Morpho’s fee engine is running. The question is who’s actually collecting.

Why Morpho’s Valuation Looks Stretched

Token Terminal put the protocol’s valuation at approximately 1.7 billion dollars. On $17M in estimated DAO revenue, that’s a price-to-revenue multiple that most traditional finance analysts would struggle to justify on fundamentals alone.

Aave’s numbers tell a different story. The protocol pulled in roughly $140M against a similar ~$1.5B market cap. That math works out to a far tighter revenue multiple. Aave has been dealing with its own structural questions lately, but the revenue base is something Morpho simply hasn’t matched at the DAO level yet.

Token Terminal’s post on X didn’t frame this as a criticism of Morpho. Just raw data.

Morpho’s Fee Growth Is Real, Even If Revenue Isn’t

The cumulative fee chart from Token Terminal tells an honest story. From early 2023 through mid-2024, Morpho’s fee activity was nearly flat. Then something changed. By October 2025, weekly fees were regularly hitting $5M or above. January 2026 saw some of the highest weekly numbers the protocol has recorded.

That’s not nothing. Total three-year cumulative fees at $312.7M shows the protocol is handling real volume.

The gap between gross borrower interest and actual DAO revenue comes down to protocol design. Morpho operates at the infrastructure layer. Vault curators, like those running the RLUSD vault launched by Sentora, capture much of the yield. The DAO take rate is a fraction of total interest paid.

Whether that model holds up against Aave’s more direct revenue capture is the conversation Token Terminal’s data just forced into the open.

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