Last week Morpho, the DeFi lending platform, announced a partnership with alternative asset manager Apollo Global (AUM $738 bn), with plans for Apollo to acquire up to 90 million tokens over the next four years. That would account for around 16% of Morpho’s currently circulating tokens, or 9% of its maximum supply.
This partnership highlights a key structural difference between Morpho and established DeFi protocols. Morpho is similar to the high profile DeFi lending protocol Aave, but Morpho is more permissionless in an important way. In Aave, adding a new asset requires a governance vote for the whole protocol, which takes time and is not required in Morpho. The announcement said that “Apollo and Morpho will be working together to support onchain lending markets on Morpho’s protocol.” They already have an indirect relationship, with a tokenized Apollo fund used in a lending pool last year.
Apollo is by no means the only traditional finance firm taking an interest in Morpho. Mainstream fund administrator Apex Group recently integrated its Apex Digital 3.0 system to use its transfer agent services to support Morpho RWA lending pools, demonstrating growing institutional infrastructure around the platform.
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