For the better part of two years, the drift of traditional finance towards crypto infrastructure has been a familiar headline. Banks and asset managers commissioned research, ran pilots, and spoke cautiously of “exploring blockchain.” It was easy to dismiss as corporate tourism.

In recent weeks a string of token purchases by some of Wall Street’s most powerful firms has signalled something altogether more consequential. BlackRock has bought UNI, the governance token of Uniswap, the largest decentralised exchange. Apollo Global has acquired MORPHO. Citadel Securities has snapped up ZRO. These are not experiments with plumbing, they are direct stakes in the protocols that govern decentralised finance. TradFi’s giants are no longer peering at DeFi through the glass. They are walking through the door.

BlackRock plants its flag

Last week the world’s largest asset manager took a step that would have seemed improbable not long ago. In partnership with Securitize and Uniswap Labs, BlackRock made its tokenised treasury fund, BUIDL, tradeable through UniswapX for eligible investors. More striking still was what accompanied the announcement: the firm disclosed that it had purchased an undisclosed quantity of UNI — the first pure DeFi governance token to sit on its balance sheet. Markets took note. UNI surged roughly 35% before retreating to its prior range.

The significance, though, lies beyond the price action. The move advances institutional trading of real world assets onchain and, perhaps more importantly, demonstrates that a firm as compliance-conscious as BlackRock now considers a decentralised exchange a viable partner for regulated liquidity. That is not a small thing.

Apollo doubles down

Apollo Global followed days later. The Wall Street giant struck a deal granting it the right to acquire up to 90 million MORPHO tokens over 48 months, roughly 9% of the protocol’s governance supply, as part of a broader partnership to support decentralised credit markets. The two firms will collaborate on building lending markets atop Morpho’s infrastructure.

For Apollo, this is a logical next step. The firm has already issued ACRED, a tokenised credit fund, and made a significant investment in Plume, a blockchain designed to bring traditional finance products on-chain. As with BlackRock’s move, MORPHO rallied sharply on the news before settling. But the price is beside the point. What matters is the signal: one of the world’s most influential alternative asset managers is no longer merely tokenising its own products. It is positioning itself for deep integration into onchain credit markets — a domain that, until recently, belonged almost entirely to DeFi natives.

Citadel builds its own rails

Citadel Securities made perhaps the most ambitious move of all. On February 10th the firm announced a strategic partnership with LayerZero Labs, centred on “Zero”, a new Layer 1 blockchain built explicitly for institutional financial markets. Designed to handle up to two million transactions per second using zero-knowledge proofs and distributed processing, Zero aims to solve the scalability and throughput constraints that have long kept serious financial infrastructure off-chain. Its mainnet launch is slated for the autumn.

Citadel backed the partnership with a direct purchase of ZRO, LayerZero’s governance token, reportedly the firm’s first crypto token acquisition. But the investment is secondary to the intent. Citadel is contributing its market-structure expertise to shape Zero for high throughput trading execution, clearing, and settlement — functions where microseconds matter. It is not merely funding a blockchain; it is helping design one to its own specifications.

The project’s roster of collaborators reinforces the point. The DTCC, Intercontinental Exchange, and Google Cloud are all involved. ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood sits on the advisory board. Tether has invested as well. ZRO rallied on the news, as one might expect. But the deeper significance is strategic, not speculative. A firm synonymous with traditional market-making now sees onchain infrastructure as the plumbing for the next generation of global finance.

What it all means

Taken together, these moves mark an inflection point. Three of Wall Street’s most prominent institutions have, within the space of a fortnight, acquired governance tokens in decentralised protocols, not as speculative bets, but as strategic positions tied to real partnerships and infrastructure builds. The convergence of TradFi and DeFi is no longer just a talking point at conferences, it is being written into balance sheets.