BlackRock, Apollo, and Citadel Enter the Same Week, Buying DeFi Governance Tokens with Real Money

Author: José Sanchez & Kelvin Koh

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Overview: In February 2026, the way traditional financial institutions enter DeFi has fundamentally changed: no longer just strategic partnership announcements, but directly buying governance tokens and routing products to decentralized infrastructure.

Within five days, Citadel bought ZRO, BlackRock listed UNI and launched BUIDL on UniswapX, and Apollo promised to acquire up to 9% of Morpho’s token supply within four years. Spartan Group believes this marks a true turning point for DeFi institutionalization.

Full text below:

DeFi Institutionalization Turning Point

In February 2026, within just five days, a series of landmark institutions and crypto collaborations emerged rapidly. We believe this signals a fundamental shift in how traditional finance engages with on-chain infrastructure.

Citadel Securities announced investment in LayerZero’s ZRO token; BlackRock listed its $2.5 billion BUIDL fund on UniswapX and purchased UNI tokens; Apollo Global Management committed to acquiring up to 9% of Morpho’s governance token supply within four years.

Previously, the NYSE announced on January 19 the launch of a tokenized securities platform supporting 24/7 on-chain settlement. The pattern is clear: institutional capital is shifting from exploration to real on-chain execution—buying tokens, gaining governance rights, and routing products to decentralized infrastructure.

This wave of entry differs from previous cycles in three ways:

First, these are direct token purchases creating economic alignment, not advisory arrangements or pilot statements.

Second, the related products are actively operated and generating real revenue: BUIDL manages $2.5 billion; Morpho supports over $900 million in active loans on Coinbase; LayerZero has completed $70 billion in USDT cross-chain transfers and settlements.

Third, institutions are choosing open, permissionless protocols rather than proprietary closed systems, indicating that the composability and network effects of existing DeFi infrastructure are more valuable than control offered by custom systems.

The NYSE’s announcement on January 19 kicked off this trend, planning to build a blockchain-based venue supporting 24/7 tokenized stock and ETF trading with instant on-chain settlement, integrating its Pillar matching engine with blockchain trading systems. Although still awaiting regulatory approval and with limited implementation details, this is a top-level directional signal: the world’s most iconic stock exchange is making on-chain settlement a core infrastructure.

LayerZero then released Zero on February 10, a new L1 designed specifically for institutional-grade financial infrastructure. Citadel Securities’ strategic purchase of ZRO is significant for a company handling about 35% of US retail stock trading.

DTCC will explore expanding its tokenization and collateral management capabilities with Zero; ICE is evaluating the chain for 24/7 trading infrastructure; Google Cloud joins to explore AI agent micro-payments; ARK Invest holds both equity and token positions, with Cathie Wood joining the advisory board.

Tether also announced a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs on the same day. Zero is expected to launch in fall 2026, with three zones: a general EVM environment, a privacy-focused payment zone, and a dedicated trading zone.

Institutional interest reflects proven throughput capacity. USDT0—Tether’s full-chain stablecoin built on LayerZero’s OFT standard—has facilitated over $70 billion in cross-chain transfers since January 2025.

As shown in the chart below, after USDT0’s launch, daily settlement volume surged, transforming LayerZero from a messaging layer into a critical financial infrastructure.

Image: USDT0 has facilitated over $70 billion in cross-chain transfers since launch

Source: BridgeWTF

The next day, BlackRock’s $2.4 billion BUIDL fund (the largest tokenized US Treasury product) was listed and tradable on UniswapX, marking BlackRock’s first product accessible via decentralized exchange infrastructure.

Securitize handles compliance and whitelisting; Wintermute, Flowdesk, and Tokka Labs compete for quotes via UniswapX’s RFQ framework. BlackRock also disclosed a strategic purchase of UNI tokens (terms not yet public), marking its first DeFi governance token on its balance sheet.

While access to BUIDL remains limited to qualified buyers with at least $5 million, Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo said the infrastructure is designed to expand to retail over time.

Listing on Uniswap reflects BUIDL’s evolution from a niche experiment to an institutional-scale product. Since launching in March 2024 with $40 million, the fund peaked at nearly $2.9 billion mid-2025 and currently has a TVL of about $2.5 billion.

Image: BlackRock BUIDL fund’s current TVL is $2.5 billion

Source: Defillama

On February 13, Apollo Global Management signed a partnership agreement, committing to acquire up to 90 million MORPHO tokens (about 9% of total supply) within 48 months.

Beyond token purchases (valued at approximately $110 million at mid-February prices), Apollo will collaborate on building on-chain lending markets, extending its blockchain strategy—some of its credit strategies are already tokenized via Securitize (ACRED) and Anemoy (ACRDX).

This is one of the most significant collaborations between institutions and native DeFi protocols to date.

Opportunities within Morpho go beyond token holdings. Its architecture allows any entity to become a vault curator, customizing risk parameters to build lending markets. Curators earn performance fees from generated yields and management fees (up to 5%) from AUM, creating sustainable revenue streams for institutional participants.

Perhaps the most compelling infrastructure validation is Coinbase’s CeFi-DeFi “Mowhawk” model: retail users borrow against BTC and ETH via Coinbase’s interface, while Morpho acts as the backend lending engine, supporting over $900 million in active loans and $1.7 billion in collateral.

This demonstrates that institutional-grade DeFi can be abstracted and scaled behind familiar consumer interfaces, without users needing to interact directly with underlying protocols.

For Apollo, vault curator economics, Coinbase’s verified distribution channels, and governance influence gained through token accumulation form a strong on-chain lending positioning.

This convergence validates the design choice of permissionless, composable protocols and indicates ongoing demand for infrastructure layer governance tokens.

Major risks remain in execution: regulatory approval for NYSE’s platform and Zero is still pending; institutional token purchases may test protocol governance; gaps between statements and ongoing on-chain activity remain large. Nonetheless, the directional signals are clear.

Image: Morpho vault curators have generated substantial fee income

Source: Blockworks Research

Looking ahead, we expect these collaborations to deepen once the CLARITY Act is passed. The bill was approved by the House in July 2025 with a vote of 294 to 134 and is now advancing in the Senate, with the Banking and Agriculture Committees coordinating their drafts before full votes.

The main controversy concerns stablecoin yield treatment: banks push to restrict interest payments on stablecoin balances, while crypto firms argue this will push innovation offshore.

July is widely seen as the key deadline before the August recess; missing it would delay the next window until fall. Once enacted, the CLARITY Act will establish the first comprehensive U.S. digital asset regulatory framework, clarifying SEC/CFTC jurisdiction, creating registration pathways for digital commodity exchanges, and providing legal certainty for tokenized products.

For protocols like Morpho and UniswapX, this will eliminate current regulatory ambiguities that limit institutional cooperation. We believe this will unlock a second wave of broader TradFi-crypto integration.