Institutional interest in crypto is accelerating even as markets fluctuate, according to Sui executives at the Hong Kong Consensus 2026.
Stephen Mackintosh, chief investment officer of Sui Group Holdings, called 2025 a “historic year for institutional adoption,” highlighting the rise of digital asset treasury (DAT) vehicles and the success of spot bitcoin ETFs.
“After the Genius Act, we saw a lot more institutional demand and awareness of what the promise of crypto could deliver,” he said, particularly as it relates to tokenization and stablecoins.
Although sentiment has fluctuated, Mackintosh says the structural change is clear. “The market, despite the low sentiment, has never been bigger,” he said, citing record options volumes and the entry of major companies such as Citadel and Jane Street into the crypto 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 defined the next phase as convergence rather than competition between traditional finance and decentralized finance. According to him, TradFi products often operate at “T+1 or T+whatever,” while DeFi is at “T+0,” a “strictly better product” in terms of settlement.
Convergence, he suggested, will emerge through tokenization. “You acquire [an asset] and immediately you can collateralize and borrow against that,” Cheng said, enabling DeFi strategies layered on top of traditional exposure.
As for whether ETFs compete with DeFi, Cheng said the products will evolve. Institutional on-ramps may start conservatively, but could incorporate yield or other on-chain mechanisms over time.
Both leaders 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 throughput suitable for emerging use cases such as “agent commerce,” the intersection of AI and on-chain transactions.
