😶‍🌫️ Inside Morph

It’s starting to feel like everyone wants their own tokenized fund. 

Yesterday, Securitize announced that they were partnering with VanEck on the asset manager’s first tokenized treasury fund, VBILL.

Like most of these funds, it’s not exactly open to the public. Qualified and institutional investors will have to cough up $100,000 on most blockchains, but a million on Ethereum. Not exactly cheap.

It’s another entrant in the tokenization race, and I’ll be curious to see who comes out on top. Right now, it seems that one thing is becoming more clear: Securitize is cornering the market when it comes to traditional firms looking to get a piece of the crypto pie. 

But this is a highly competitive market, and it’s far too early to call a winner. 

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s sitting at $104,000 this morning, a slight increase over the past day.

• ETH’s up over 5% to $2,600, while Solana’s up nearly 5% to $181. 

• DeFi TVL is up 2.4% in the past day to $118 billion, per Blockworks Research.

🤺 Power struggles

Yesterday, Jack Kubinec and I published a scoop on Bitget’s L2, Morph.

The blockchain, which launched mainnet last year, has dealt with quite a few struggles from employees leaving or being laid off, cofounder tension and, strangely enough, a “shadow CEO.”

If you haven’t already read the investigation in full, I’m going to give you a pared-down version — TL;DR, if you will. Though I encourage everyone to read the original piece in its entirety. 

Let’s start at the top: It’s not abnormal for L2s to spend big on events, especially as they prepare for mainnet and TGE. However, an ex-employee recounted that they didn’t receive budget guidance for events. 

So on top of events being held at places like Singapore’s ArtScience Museum, per an old Lu.ma invite, the project also allegedly paid for the travel and accommodations for tripleS, a K-pop band, when they performed at another event, per a source.

The spending, one source said, didn’t align with the bottom line. 

Then there’s the strangeness around the executive makeup. Originally, Morph had two cofounders — Azeem Khan and Cecilia Hsueh — who operated as the chief operating officer and CEO, respectively. However, the consensus, from our conversations with a dozen former and current employees, was that it didn’t seem like Khan and Hsueh were in charge. 

Instead, people familiar pointed to Forest Bai, founder of investment firm Foresight Ventures — which took part in the $20 million seed raise last year for Morph and is the venture arm of Bitget. Foresight also owns The Block, and Bai is on their board. 

Sources noted that there was a feeling that Khan and Hsueh didn’t get the final say in decisions. But while Bai may have operated in the shadows to begin with, his role in recent months has become a lot clearer. 

Bai’s since been added to Morph’s Slack, per sources. I also reviewed internal messages that tagged an account with Bai’s name and requested his presence in some team calls. 

And then there’s this org chart. 

So, officially, Bai is a consultant, but it’s pretty telling that his name appears side by side with Hsueh’s. Multiple sources told us that Hsueh’s power has seemingly waned in recent months, but as you can see above, she remains the CEO. 

All of this being said, Morph hasn’t launched a token, despite its mainnet going live last October. One source I spoke to said, despite the hardships, Morph still plans to launch its token by the end of this year.

The overall financial health of Morph is unclear. It continues to be backed by Bitget, but we were unable to determine the status of a Series A.

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• eToro, which is set to go public, priced its IPO at $52 a share, exceeding its original range of $46 to $50. Now we’ll have to see what the public appetite is like. 

• Cantor Equity Partners disclosed a $458 million bitcoin purchase, which is expected ahead of its planned merger with Twenty One Capital (the bitcoin-focused investment vehicle backed by Tether and Softbank). 

• The Wyoming State Token Commission tapped Inca Digital as a partner for its upcoming Wyoming Stable Token, WYST.

I have another exclusive for you all this morning. 

Squads, which developed a multisig protocol on Solana, has a fun announcement: They’re launching Altitude. Basically, it’s a stablecoin-native account that allows companies to open and fund a dollar account without having to rely on traditional banks or a US entity. 

Squads CEO Stepan Simkin thinks of stablecoin-native as an account that exists “on a centralized blockchain, and as long as the blockchain is running the program, the protocol will continue running. And so that gives you very different guarantees, where it's true ownership, it's true programmability, and it's real transparency.”

As part of the unveiling, Altitude also received a strategic investment from Haun Ventures, though Simkin declined to give me exact figures. 

However, this isn’t just a new development, and the team isn’t just looking to capitalize on how hot stablecoins are right now (though, it’s an added bonus that they’re launching Altitude at this time). 

Simkin told me that he initially met Haun’s Chris Ahn two years ago, but they started to mull the concept of Altitude roughly a year ago. 

With the launch out of the way, where does Simkin see Altitude in a year?

“I think in a year, I would like us to have a consistent user base of real businesses that rely on Altitude to manage their financial operations,” he said.

“It's very achievable, particularly in the way things are progressing today, both in terms of things we're able to build, partners we're able to work with, but also what we talked about before, right? We’re a tech firm, and the [adoption of stablecoins] around the world is happening right now.”

The goal for Simkin — outside of Altitude — is to “shift the conversation towards figuring out how we can make general-purpose blockchains work for institutions and work for payments as opposed to [launching on various] chains […] and then have this segregated system.”