Traditional finance giants are making serious moves into DeFi. An asset manager with $938 billion under management, Apollo Global Management, is making a major push into the crypto world by partnering with the Morpho protocol to become a significant player.

The details of the agreement between Apollo Global Management and the Morpho Association are quite interesting. Over the next four years, they will be able to purchase 90 million MORPHO tokens. This amount represents 9% of the total supply of the protocol's governance token. Token purchases will be carried out through open market transactions, over-the-counter deals, and other methods. Galaxy Digital UK is serving as the financial advisor for the transaction.

This is not just about buying tokens. Apollo Global Management will also work to support lending markets built on the Morpho protocol. The infrastructure provided by Morpho supports on-chain asset distribution and curator-managed vaults. The protocol is governed by holders of the MORPHO token.

This move is a continuation of Apollo Global Management's blockchain strategy. Last year, the company made a seven-step investment in the PLUME project, which brings real-world assets onto the blockchain. Their own credit strategies are also being tokenized—Securitize's ACRED token provides access to the Apollo Diversified Credit Fund, while Anemoy offers the ACRDX token to track Apollo's global credit strategies.

Apollo Global Management is not alone. The world's largest asset managers, like BlackRock, are also entering DeFi. Recently, BlackRock announced that it will list shares of the tokenized U.S. Treasury bond fund BUIDL on Uniswap and has purchased UNI tokens. All these developments show that the boundaries between traditional finance and DeFi are rapidly blurring.

The price of MORPHO is currently around $1.94, while UNI is trading at $3.25. It will be interesting to see what these major institutional moves mean for the crypto market in the long term.