Skip to content

BitGo Turns Its Bank Charter Into a DeFi Yield Gateway

The Morpho partnership is the second vault deal BitGo has announced in three weeks — and together they sketch a model where a Fortune 500 infrastructure company becomes the gateway to decentralised lending for funds and treasury operators.

Table of Contents

BitGo Holdings (NYSE: BTGO) announced on Monday that it plans to expand institutional access to DeFi vault strategies through a new offering built with Morpho, the decentralised lending infrastructure protocol that currently holds more than $11 billion in deposits. The vault structure, which will be integrated with BitGo Bank & Trust — BitGo's OCC-chartered national trust bank — is designed to let eligible institutional clients access third-party onchain lending strategies while the custodian holds the corresponding vault receipt token rather than the deployed assets themselves.

Under the announced structure, independent risk managers set the vault's strategy parameters and maximum exposure limits. Morpho provides the underlying vault architecture and onchain execution infrastructure.

BitGo Bank & Trust sits one layer removed from the deployed assets — custodying the receipt token that represents the client's claim on whatever the vault holds or has earned. While the client gets institutional policy enforcement, spending limits, audit trails, and real-time monitoring, they also forgo the protection of qualified custody once their assets are inside the vault: BitGo is explicit that assets deployed to a third-party vault exit the BitGo Bank & Trust custody environment.

This separation of custody, risk management, and protocol infrastructure is what BitGo is framing as the product's central feature.

"We believe institutions are looking for ways to access onchain opportunities but also expect the security and oversight that come with institutional custody," said CEO Mike Belshe. The architecture, he argued, connects those pieces without pretending they are the same thing.

This is BitGo's second DeFi vault announcement in three weeks. On June 2, the company announced a partnership with Blueprint Finance's Concrete protocol to give clients access to onchain strategies while their underlying assets remain in qualified custody.

The Concrete integration uses synthetic representations of digital assets to reduce bridge risk, while the Morpho structure takes a different approach, deploying the assets to the vault directly and custodying the receipt token. The two deals are meaningfully different in construction, which suggests BitGo is exploring more than one model for how institutional custody and DeFi access coexist.

The timing of both announcements reflects how aggressively BitGo is expanding its product since its IPO in January. it debuted on the Fortune 500 at No. 273 on the back of $16.2 billion in 2025 revenue — the first dedicated digital asset infrastructure provider to make that list. Last week, the company appointed Angela Ang — a former Monetary Authority of Singapore official who built Singapore's crypto licensing regime — as Managing Director of APAC and President of BitGo Singapore.

Paul Frambot, Morpho's CEO and co-founder, framed the value proposition plainly: "Through Morpho's credit network, institutions can access third-party onchain lending markets through infrastructure that can be accessed using BitGo's institutional workflows."

The question worth watching is take-up. Announcing a vault structure and getting treasury operators to deploy capital into it are different things. For now, the pair of vault announcements establishes a direction: BitGo intends to be the regulated entry point for institutional capital moving into onchain lending markets, not simply a custodian that holds assets while clients engage DeFi elsewhere.

Latest