Traditional finance heavyweight Apollo Global Management has entered into a partnership with decentralized lending platform Morpho, securing a significant stake in the project and pledging support for its blockchain-based lending infrastructure.
The announcement was made Friday by the Morpho Association, the nonprofit entity overseeing the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol.
Under the cooperation agreement, Apollo or its affiliates plan to acquire up to 90 million MORPHO governance tokens over the next four years. The purchase would represent 9% of the token’s total 1 billion supply.
According to the Morpho Association, Apollo may obtain the tokens through a mix of open-market purchases, over-the-counter (OTC) deals, and other contractual arrangements. The agreement includes a 90 million-token ownership cap over a 48-month period, along with certain transfer and trading restrictions.
Beyond the token acquisition, the two parties will collaborate to strengthen onchain lending markets built on Morpho’s protocol, though specific details were not disclosed.
Following the news, MORPHO surged 17.8% over the weekend, climbing from roughly $1.12 on Friday to $1.32 at the time of writing, based on CoinGecko data. Despite the recent rally, the token remains down 38% over the past year amid a broader downturn in the crypto market.
Morpho currently ranks as the sixth-largest DeFi protocol by total value locked (TVL), with $5.8 billion secured on the platform, according to DeFi Llama. The protocol focuses on lending markets and curated investment vaults designed to help users generate yield.
The agreement with Apollo — a global asset manager overseeing nearly $940 billion in assets under management — represents the latest in a string of high-profile partnerships for Morpho.
In late January, Cointelegraph reported that digital asset manager Bitwise joined the platform to offer curated vaults targeting a 6% annual yield. More recently, Bitcoin-focused DeFi project Lombard revealed that Morpho would serve as an initial liquidity partner for the rollout of its Bitcoin Smart Accounts.
For its part, Apollo has been steadily expanding its footprint in the digital asset sector. Over the past year, the firm partnered with Coinbase to develop stablecoin-based credit strategies and made an undisclosed investment in Plume to help advance real-world asset tokenization infrastructure.
