Institutional interest in cryptocurrencies is accelerating even as markets fluctuate, according to Sui executives at Consensus Hong Kong 2026.
Stephen Mackintosh, chief investment officer at Sui Group Holdings, called 2025 a “landmark year for institutional adoption,” pointing to the rise of digital asset treasury (DAT) vehicles and the success of spot bitcoin ETFs.
“After the Genius Act, we’ve seen a lot more institutional demand and awareness of what the promise of cryptocurrencies could offer,” he said, particularly around tokenization and stablecoins.
While sentiment has fluctuated, Mackintosh argued that the structural change is clear. “The market, even though sentiment is low, has never been larger,” he said, citing record options volumes and the entry of large firms like Citadel and Jane Street into the cryptocurrency markets. He described a long-term trend in which “the world’s largest financial institutions” are investing in infrastructure and talent to capture market share.
Mysten Labs CEO Evan Cheng framed the next phase as a convergence rather than a competition between traditional finance and decentralized finance. In his view, TradFi products often operate at “T+1 or T+whatever,” while DeFi is “T+0,” a “strictly better product” in terms of settlement.
Convergence, he suggested, will emerge through tokenization. “You acquire [an asset] and you can immediately put up collateral and borrow against it,” Cheng said, enabling DeFi strategies layered on top of traditional exposure.
On whether ETFs compete with DeFi, Cheng said the products will evolve. Institutional onramps may start conservatively, but could incorporate performance or other chain mechanisms over time.
Both executives emphasized infrastructure as Sui’s differentiator. Mackintosh described Sui as “a differentiated proposition” built by former Facebook engineers behind Libra, offering low latency and high performance suitable for emerging use cases such as “agent commerce”, the intersection of AI and on-chain transactions.
