Traditional financial giants like BlackRock and Citadel have successively purchased DeFi governance tokens, possibly to secure access to infrastructure

According to The Block, earlier this month, BlackRock, Citadel Securities, and Apollo Global Management disclosed their plans to purchase DeFi governance tokens. BlackRock tokenized its treasury bond fund BUIDL on-chain through UniswapX and bought UNI tokens; Citadel Securities supported the launch of the "Zero" blockchain under LayerZero and acquired ZRO tokens; Apollo or its affiliates reached an agreement with Morpho to acquire up to 90 million MORPHO tokens over 48 months, accounting for approximately 9% of the total supply.

Several investors told The Block that the motivation for these institutions to buy governance tokens is not to allocate them as part of their investment portfolio, but rather to secure access to infrastructure.

In terms of future predictions, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan have been mentioned by several investors as the next potential entrants, with a focus on blue-chip projects related to stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and trading infrastructure.