Executives tied to the Sui ecosystem say institutional interest in crypto is growing again—even as market sentiment remains uneven—pointing to tokenization, faster settlement, and the steady normalization of crypto exposure through traditional investment vehicles. The comments were made by Stephen Mackintosh, chief investment officer of Sui Group Holdings, and Mysten Labs CEO Evan Cheng, according to a report by CoinDesk.
Mackintosh described 2025 as a turning point for institutional adoption, citing the expansion of digital asset treasury vehicles and the continued impact of spot bitcoin ETFs as an on-ramp. He also argued that the policy environment has contributed to rising awareness, saying that post-GENIUS Act momentum has helped increase institutional demand for crypto’s potential around tokenization and stablecoins, CoinDesk reported.
Cheng framed the next phase as less of a zero-sum competition between traditional finance and decentralized finance, and more of a convergence that could reshape how capital moves. In his view, traditional settlement cycles still operate on delays such as T+1, while DeFi can settle at T+0. That difference, he suggested, becomes more meaningful once real-world assets are tokenized: if you can acquire an asset and immediately collateralize it on-chain, you can unlock borrowing, hedging and liquidity strategies that are difficult to replicate in legacy systems.
This “tokenization as a bridge” thesis has become a common thread across institutions experimenting with on-chain rails. It also helps explain why ETFs may be seen as a beginning rather than an end state. ETF wrappers can deliver familiarity and regulated access, but they typically offer passive exposure. The longer-term question is whether mainstream products evolve to incorporate yield, on-chain settlement, or other mechanisms that blur the line between TradFi distribution and DeFi functionality.
Sui’s pitch, as described in the report, centers on infrastructure built for low latency and high throughput—characteristics that matter for use cases such as tokenized markets and what executives called “agentic commerce,” where AI-driven agents could initiate and settle on-chain transactions. In that framing, blockchains are not just ledgers; they become programmable backbones for financial workflows that might eventually include automated execution, compliance rules and real-time settlement.
For the broader industry, one of the most important signals of institutional engagement is not only price, but participation by major trading firms and the growth of derivatives markets. CoinDesk cited record options volumes and the entrance of large firms such as Citadel and Jane Street into crypto markets as evidence that, beneath weak sentiment, structural investment in the sector is continuing.
CoinExtra has followed similar themes from the tokenization angle. For example, we covered Apollo’s strategic interest in real-world asset infrastructure in this report, and the continued experimentation with ETF structures in our coverage of Grayscale’s ETF push. Those stories highlight a consistent trend: institutions tend to enter through familiar wrappers first, then gradually explore deeper integration with on-chain systems.
Sui’s leadership is ultimately making a forward-looking bet that the next wave of institutional adoption will be driven less by narratives and more by product advantages: instant settlement, composable markets, and tokenization that turns assets into programmable building blocks. For readers looking for Sui’s own positioning and technical materials, the project maintains an official hub at sui.io.
Whether that vision translates into sustained demand will depend on regulation, market cycles, and whether tokenized workflows can deliver meaningful improvements to real users. But the direction of travel—toward convergence and on-chain settlement—is increasingly hard to ignore.
