In February 2026, the crypto market witnessed a historic turning point. Traditional financial giants including BlackRock, Citadel Securities, and Apollo Global Management have disclosed plans to acquire DeFi governance tokens. However, unlike retail investors' logic of "buy low, sell high," the goal of Wall Street titans is not asset allocation, but to seize the "usage rights" and "control" over Web3's underlying infrastructure. As DeFi transforms completely from a cypherpunk social experiment into a "retail storefront" for traditional finance to issue tokenized assets, a covert war over infrastructure monopoly has begun. **Introduction: The Paradigm Shift from 'Buying Assets' to 'Buying Infrastructure'** Looking back over the past few years, traditional finance's path into cryptocurrency was very clear: from CME Bitcoin futures to the launch of Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs in 2024. In that phase, Wall Street viewed crypto as a "digital asset available for trading," akin to digital gold or high-tech stocks. However, entering 2026, this paradigm has undergone a fundamental. According to the latest revelations from The Block, the tentacles of traditional financial giants have reached the core of DeFi protocols—governance tokens. This is not a simple attempt at portfolio diversification, but a long-planned "new enclosure movement." When giants realize that future financial clearing, asset issuance, and cross-border flows will irreversibly migrate to the blockchain, buying the "dominance" of these decentralized protocols is equivalent to buying the "toll booths" on the global financial system's highways for the next decade. **I. The Giants' Shopping Cart: Who Bought What and Why?** Judging from the several major acquisitions disclosed this month, Wall Street's prey is extremely precise, covering three core tracks of the DeFi space: decentralized exchanges, cross-chain interoperability, and decentralized lending. **1. BlackRock and Uniswap (UNI)** As the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock's ambitions have long exceeded Bitcoin ETFs. Currently, BlackRock is pushing its flagship tokenized U.S. Treasury fund (BUIDL) on-chain via UniswapX and has directly purchased UNI tokens. * **Deep Logic:** BlackRock holds massive Real World Assets. But putting assets on-chain is only the first step. How to provide global liquidity for these tokenized Treasuries? Uniswap is currently the deepest source of on-chain liquidity. By holding UNI, BlackRock gains influence in DAO governance, ensuring that UniswapX's routing protocols and pool policies favor its BUIDL fund, thus building a seamless "Treasury distribution network." **2. Citadel Securities and LayerZero (ZRO)** As one of Wall Street's most dominant market makers, Citadel Securities supported the launch of the "Zero" blockchain by omnichain interoperability protocol LayerZero and significantly increased its ZRO holdings. * **Deep Logic:** The lifeblood of modern market makers lies in "cross-market arbitrage" and "liquidity." In the multi-chain Web3 era, liquidity is extremely fragmented. LayerZero, as a foundational cross-chain messaging protocol, is the bridge connecting isolated islands. By acquiring ZRO, Citadel Securities is essentially building a proprietary, low-latency cross-chain settlement corridor. Controlling LayerZero means establishing its own "high-frequency trading express lane" between various public chains. **3. Apollo and Morpho (MORPHO)** Apollo Global Management, managing hundreds of billions in assets, has reached an aggressive acquisition agreement with decentralized lending protocol Morpho: acquiring up to 90 million MORPHO tokens over the next 48 months, representing about 9% of its total supply. * **Deep Logic:** Lending is the cornerstone of the financial ecosystem. Morpho has emerged in the lending with its efficient peer-to-peer matching mechanism and modular risk management. Apollo securing 9% of the token supply means it becomes a direct "major shareholder" of the protocol. In the future, Apollo could introduce its own institutional-grade credit assets into Morpho's lending pools via governance proposals, leveraging global crypto investor capital to amplify its own实体 business. **II. Core Motivation: 'Vendor Lock-in,' Not 'Asset Allocation'** Why would these giants managing trillions of dollars eye DeFi tokens with current market caps of only a few billion or even hundred million? Jake Brukhman, founder of CoinFund, provided a precise: "This is vendor lock-in, not asset allocation." **1. The Business Closed Loop from 'Factory' to 'Retail Storefront'** Lex Sokolin, co-founder of Generative Ventures, offered an insightful metaphor: In the future tokenized financial landscape, traditional financial institutions play the role of the **"factory,"** producing compliant tokenized products (like tokenized Treasuries, real estate, corporate credit). DeFi markets, in turn, are the **"retail storefronts"** for these products. After the "factory" produces goods, without a "storefront" for distribution, they are just code without liquidity. By purchasing DeFi governance tokens, Wall Street giants are directly buying equity or operational rights in these "world's largest连锁 retail storefronts." **2. Governance Rights Equal Usage Rights** In traditional software, companies acquire services by purchasing SaaS licenses. In the Web3 era, protocol code is open source, but the protocol's **"parameters"** (like trading fees, supported collateral types, incentive distribution paths) are determined by the DAO holding governance tokens. Giants understand that without sufficient governance tokens, they could be marginalized in community votes at any time. Buying tokens is about deeply integrating themselves with the infrastructure, ensuring these decentralized protocols evolve in a direction aligned with Wall Street's interests. **III. Favorable Winds: The 2026 Regulatory Thaw as a Catalyst** Traditional finance has always treated compliance as its lifeline. Rewinding two years, such blatant accumulation of DeFi tokens would have been unthinkable. Behind this wave of institutional entry is a seismic shift in the U.S. crypto regulatory environment from 2025 to 2026. Several institutional investors point to four key policy catalysts that have cleared Wall Street's compliance hurdles: * **The Historic Repeal of SAB 121:** In early 2025, the SEC's controversial Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121 was formally repealed. This rule had strictly required banks custodying crypto assets to list them on their balance sheets, greatly hindering institutional entry. Its repeal finally allows Wall Street banks to legally and cost-effectively custody DeFi tokens for clients and themselves. * **End of Enforcement Actions:** The SEC has dismissed or dropped investigations and lawsuits against core DeFi protocols like Uniswap, Coinbase, and Aave. This "truce" sends a clear signal that decentralized protocols themselves are not considered illegal entities. * **The Enactment of the GENIUS Act:** Established a clear federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, the lifeblood of DeFi. This provides national-level endorsement for capital flows within the DeFi ecosystem. * **The 'Project Crypto' Framework:** Most critically, the SEC, through this project, explicitly classified most decentralized "governance tokens" as **"non-securities."** This completely removed the legal red line for institutions buying and holding these tokens. **IV. The Price Disconnect Mystery: Why Haven't DeFi Tokens Skyrocketed?** Common sense suggests that entry by BlackRock and Citadel Securities should trigger a surge in related DeFi tokens. However, the harsh reality is that despite significant institutional capital inflows, DeFi token prices haven't seen sustained rises. This divergence reveals the core pain point of current DeFi governance tokens: **a lack of substantial value capture mechanisms.** **1. "Voting Rights Without Dividends"** For retail investors, the core appeal of buying tokens is sharing in the protocol's growth dividends. Yet currently, most DeFi governance tokens grant holders voting rights but do not distribute the massive fees (cash flow) generated by the protocol to them. Institutions buy tokens for "usage rights" and "strategic positioning"; they care less about short-term price swings and may even prefer to accumulate slowly via OTC during downturns. Retail investors, seeing no real profit-sharing (like activating the "Fee Switch"), have no incentive to buy in. **2. Three Catalysts Needed for a Breakthrough** Investors generally believe that for DeFi tokens to truly experience a price revaluation, three key milestones are needed: * **Legalization of Value Capture:** A clear mechanism must be established linking protocol cash flow to the token. This requires DAOs, while ensuring compliance, to courageously activate profit distribution models. * **Approval of DeFi Spot ETFs:** Similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum, only when spot ETFs for blue-chip DeFi indices like UNI, AAVE, MKR are approved will the ultimate channel for traditional retail capital inflow be opened. * **Enactment of the CLARITY Act:** The market awaits this act, which would further clarify the legal status of decentralized entities, resolving tax and security law disputes related to DAO distributions. **V. Outlook: The Next Wave of Giants and the Birth of 'New Blue Chips'** BlackRock and Apollo are just the vanguard. According to The Block, traditional giants including Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase are seen as the next potential entrants. Future focus will be unprecedentedly concentrated: institutional attention will not stray towards-laden Meme coins or projects without real revenue, but will firmly on three core infrastructure pillars: * **Stablecoins and Payment Protocols:** The bridge linking fiat to the chain. * **Tokenized RWA Protocols:** The containers for-level assets. * **Core Trading and Liquidity Infrastructure:** Like top DEXs and omnichain interoperability protocols. **Conclusion: Web3 'Co-opted' by Wall Street** This institutional shopping spree in early 2026 reveals a bittersweet truth for crypto natives: DeFi is inexorably becoming institutionalized. It is transforming from a cypherpunk experiment aimed at Wall Street into the backend infrastructure for Wall Street to upgrade its own financial systems. Giants are not just entering with massive capital, but with their compliance frameworks, actuarial models, and monopolistic thinking, beginning to occupy "board seats" within the world's largest decentralized protocols. For ordinary Web3 investors, this means the era of "outlaw heroes" is over. Future investment logic will no longer be about finding the next 100x pure concept narrative, but following the giants' footsteps to identify the truly irreplaceable, "Wall Street-grade digital infrastructure" capable of trillion-dollar capital flows. In this new enclosure movement, recognizing who the true "path builders" are and who the ultimate "harvesters" will be, will determine investors' wealth in the next decade.