Institutional interest in crypto is accelerating even as markets fluctuate, according to Sui executives at Consensus Hong Kong 2026.
Stephen Mackintosh, Chief Investment Officer of 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.
“After the Genius Act, we’ve seen so much more institutional demand and awareness of what the promise of crypto could deliver,” he said, particularly around tokenization and stablecoins.
While sentiment has fluctuated, Mackintosh argued that the structural shift is clear. “The market, despite all the low sentiment, has never been bigger,” he said, citing record options volume and major firms such as Citadel and Jane Street’s entry into crypto markets. He described a long-term trend in which “the largest institutions in finance in the world” are investing in infrastructure and talent to capture market share.
Mysten Labs CEO Evan Cheng framed the next phase as convergence rather than competition between traditional finance and decentralized finance. In his view, TradFi products often operate on “T+1 or T+whatever”, while DeFi is “T+0” – a “strictly better product” in settlement terms.
The convergence, he suggested, will occur through tokenization. “You acquire [an asset] and immediately you can collateralize and borrow against it,” Cheng said, enabling DeFi strategies layered on traditional exposure.
As for whether ETFs compete with DeFi, Cheng said the products will evolve. Institutional on-ramps may start conservatively, but may eventually incorporate dividends or other on-chain mechanics.
Both executives highlighted infrastructure as Sui’s differentiator. Mackintosh described Sui as “a differentiated proposition” built by ex-Facebook engineers behind Libra, offering low latency and high throughput suitable for new use cases such as “agentic commerce”, the intersection of AI and onchain transactions.
