According to Sui officials at Consensus Hong Kong 2026, institutional interest in crypto is growing despite market volatility.
Stephen McIntosh, chief investment officer at Sui Group Holdings, called 2025 “a landmark year for institutional adoption,” pointing to the boom in digital asset treasury (DAT) vehicles and the success of spot Bitcoin ETFs.
“Following the Genius Act, we have seen a lot of institutional demand and awareness of what the promise of crypto can deliver,” he said, particularly around tokenization and stablecoins.
While sentiment has fluctuated, Mackintosh argued that structural change is clear. “Despite all assumptions going down, the market has never been bigger,” he said, citing record options volume and the entry of major companies like Citadel and Jane Street into crypto markets. He described a long-term trend in which “the largest institutions of finance in the world” are investing in infrastructure and talent to gain market share.
Ivan Cheng, CEO of Mysten Labs, framed the next phase as a convergence rather than competition between traditional finance and decentralized finance. In his view, TradeFi products often operate at “T+1 or T+whatever”, while DeFi is “T+0” – a “strictly better product” in terms of settlement.
He suggested that convergence will emerge through tokenization. “You achieve [an asset] And instantly you can create collateral and borrow against it,” Cheng said, enabling DeFi strategies based on traditional exposures.
Asked whether ETFs compete with DeFi, Cheng said products will evolve. Institutional on-ramps may start conservatively but incorporate yield or other on-chain mechanics over time.
Both executives emphasized infrastructure as Sui’s differentiator. McIntosh described Sui as “a differentiated proposition” built by the former Facebook engineers behind Libra, offering low latency and high throughput suitable for the intersection of emerging use cases such as “agent commerce”, AI and onchain transactions.