Apollo partners with Morpho to support credit infrastructure
Traditional finance giant Apollo Global Management Inc. has signed a partnership agreement with decentralized lending platform Morpho to take a majority stake in the project and support its blockchain lending infrastructure.
The move was announced on Friday by the Morpho Association, a non-profit organization behind the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform.
The partnership or “collaboration agreement” will see Apollo or its affiliates purchase up to 90 million MORPHO management tokens over the next four years, representing 9% of the total 1 billion-token MORPHO supply.
“Pursuant to the agreement, Apollo or its affiliates may acquire MORPHO tokens through market purchases, OTC transactions and other contractual arrangements, with an aggregate ownership limit of 90 million MORPHO tokens over a 48-month period, as well as transfer and transaction limits,” the Morpho Association said.
The Morpho Association will work together “on the Morpho protocol to support on-chain credit markets,” he added, without giving further details.
The move marked a 17.8% drop in MORPHO's price over the weekend, rising from $1.12 to $1.32 on Friday, according to CoinGecko data.
However, the property has fallen by 38% over the past 12 months.
Morpho is the sixth largest DeFi protocol by total value locked, with $5.8 billion, according to DeFi Lama. The project mainly provides investors with credit markets and pooled investment space to get yield.
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The deal with Apollo, a multinational asset manager with nearly $940 billion in assets under management, marks another significant partnership confirmed by Morpho in recent months.
At the end of January, Cointelegraph reported that digital asset manager Bitwise had jumped on board to offer a 6% annualized yield on Morpho. Last week, Bitcoin DeFi project Lombard Morpho announced that it had signed on as the first liquidity partner for its Bitcoin Smart Account startup.
Meanwhile, Apollo has been gradually increasing its exposure to crypto and blockchain. Last year, the company partnered with Coinbase to develop stablecoin lending strategies and made an undisclosed investment in Plum to support real-world real-estate token infrastructure.
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