According to Sui executives at Consensus Hong Kong 2026, institutional interest in cryptocurrencies is accelerating even with market volatility.
Stephen Mackintosh, chief investment officer of Sui Group Holdings, called 2025 a “milestone year for institutional adoption,” pointing to the boom in digital asset treasury (DAT) instruments and the success of spot Bitcoin ETFs.
“After the Genius Act, we saw more institutional demand and awareness of the promise of cryptocurrencies, particularly around tokenization and stablecoins,” he said.
Despite the mood swings, McIntosh believes the structural shift is clear. “Despite the subdued sentiment, the market has never been stronger,” he said, citing record options trading volumes and the entry of major companies such as Citadel and Jane Street into the cryptocurrency market. He described a long-term trend in which “the world’s largest financial institutions” are investing in infrastructure and talent to capture market share.
Evan Cheng, CEO of Mysten Labs, defines the next stage as a convergence between traditional finance and decentralized finance, rather than competition. In his view, TradFi products typically operate on a “T+1 or T+whatever” basis, while DeFi is “T+0” – “definitely the better product” from a settlement perspective.
This integration will occur through tokenization, he said. “You gain [an asset] You can stake and borrow instantly,” Cheng said, which enables DeFi strategies to be based on traditional risk exposures.
Regarding whether ETFs compete with DeFi, Cheng said that products will continue to evolve. Institutional onboarding may start conservatively but may incorporate yield or other on-chain mechanisms over time.
Both executives emphasized infrastructure as Sui’s differentiator. McIntosh described Sui as a “differentiating proposition” built by the former Facebook engineers behind Libra, offering low latency and high throughput suitable for emerging use cases such as the intersection of “agent commerce,” artificial intelligence, and on-chain transactions.
