Building Institutional Crypto Infrastructure: Liquidity Summit 2026

In recent years, the crypto and blockchain industry has witnessed how institutional adoption has changed everything. The question is no longer whether blockchain technology works. It is whether the infrastructure beneath it can withstand institutional pressure when markets move violently, liquidity fragments, or systems fail.

In 2025, BlackRock’s IBIT crossed $40 billion in cumulative net inflows. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries surpassed $5 billion in market cap in March, reaching over $8 billion by October. Meanwhile, JPMorgan arranged a landmark $50 million commercial paper issuance on Solana in December, while Goldman Sachs launched tokenized money market funds with BNY Mellon.

The technology has proven its direction. What remains is the harder work: custody architecture, regulatory alignment, legacy integration, and the institutional trust that only consistency can build.

At Liquidity Summit 2026 in Hong Kong, a panel titled “Building Institutional Rails for the Digital Asset Economy” put those questions directly to the people building the answers.

The session was moderated by Alevtina Labyuk, Chief Strategic Partnerships Officer at BeInCrypto, and featured Chris Shin (Director of Global Strategic Partnerships at Kyobo Life Insurance), Jay Kim (Senior Manager, Digital Asset Business at Mirae Asset Securities), Zeng Xin (Senior Web3 Solution Architect at AWS), Sherry Zhu (Global Head of Digital Assets at Futu Holdings), and Ramzy Ali (Head of DeFi at the Solana Foundation).

Watch the full panel discussion here:

The Integration Problem Nobody Can Skip

Jay Kim of Mirae Asset Securities opened with a blunt assessment of where the friction actually lives. Three problems dominate the conversation. Client data sovereignty comes first. In Korea and Hong Kong, data protection obligations make it legally untenable to put client information on public blockchains. Kim said that Mirae’s working solution is hybrid.

He elaborated:

Custody is structurally harder. Traditional finance is built around custodian banks and centralized depositories. Digital assets require controlling private keys, which demands new internal policies and a credible security narrative for regulators. 

Then there is the trading venue problem. Hundreds of platforms exist, some settling in stablecoins, some in fiat, some like Hyperliquid operating entirely on-chain. Aggregating that liquidity requires understanding each venue’s infrastructure individually.

“The balancing is very hard,” Kim said, adding:

Chris Shin of Kyobo Life Insurance added the institutional inertia dimension. His firm’s answer is a hybrid model where they build outside the legacy system first, prove the concept externally, then use that proof to win over internal stakeholders and regulators.

“Once we have a proven model from outside, we have an easier time persuading the internal stakeholders,” he said.

The Traditional Broker’s Edge

For Futu Holdings, which operates one of Asia’s largest fintech brokerage platforms with 28 million global users, the crypto entry isn’t about catching up. It’s about deploying what legacy players uniquely have.

Sherry Zhu distilled it to two words — trust and convenience. Regulatory licenses, brand credibility, and established banking relationships produce something crypto-native exchanges cannot easily replicate, which is banks that will actually facilitate fiat flows for crypto trading. That fiat rail advantage is more consequential than it sounds.

She explained:

The challenges are real, too. Talent sits near the top of the list. Managing custody, keys, and on-chain risk requires skills most finance professionals do not have, and bridging that gap takes time. The structural advantages of licensing, compliance infrastructure, and multi-asset capability are not easily replicated from the other direction.

Infrastructure: Consistency Over Hype

From the protocol layer, Ramzy Ali of the Solana Foundation argued that institutional confidence hinges on consistency.

Solana processed $1.6 trillion in trading volume last year and maintains approximately $14 billion in stablecoin liquidity on a single-state Layer-1. According to Ali, uptime and transaction reliability matter more than theoretical scalability.

“Ultimately, the infrastructure requirements are consistent,” he said.

Beyond performance, institutions require compliance-compatible tooling. Solana introduced a zero-knowledge-based attestation service that allows applications to verify wallet eligibility without exposing private data. It also developed a private execution environment that enables transaction privacy directly within layer-1.

These tools aim to bridge centralized finance and decentralized infrastructure without forcing institutions to abandon compliance frameworks.

Meanwhile, Zeng Xin of AWS reframed resilience in business terms.

“People don’t judge institutions on a normal day. They judge you on a fluctuation day,” he said.

Xin described cloud elasticity as “revenue insurance.” For digital asset platforms, traffic spikes, liquidation cascades, and volatility events are not edge cases. They are recurring realities. Infrastructure must absorb those shocks without service failure.

The Signals Everyone Is Watching

Maturity in any market tends to announce itself quietly. Not through press releases, but through behavior when the moment participants stop asking whether something works and start assuming it does.

The panel had different ideas about when that moment arrives for digital assets, but the answers shared a common thread.

Kim’s marker was equities. Not tokenized funds, not derivative products that reference underlying assets at a distance, but actual listed stocks with shareholder rights embedded on-chain and circulating on public chains. He said:

The subtext is significant. Listed equities are the foundation of most traditional financial products. If they move on-chain, everything built on top of them follows, not as a choice but as a consequence.

Ali framed it as a price discovery problem. Right now, Bitcoin’s price is effectively set on centralized derivatives venues. U.S. equities are priced on the Nasdaq. The question he posed was simple: when does a globally significant asset have its price discovered on-chain first?

That would mean on-chain liquidity had become the deepest pool, not a parallel one. Institutions would stop treating crypto as a market to participate in and start treating the chain as the market itself.

Zhu’s signal was more regulatory in nature. She pointed to the moment when Hong Kong, or any major jurisdiction, formally permits crypto to serve as collateral for margin purposes on equal footing with traditional securities. That single policy shift would change the accounting, the risk management calculus, and ultimately the institutional appetite in ways that no amount of infrastructure alone can produce.

Shin, characteristically, came back to the legal framework in Korea. The retail market there is already vibrant. What’s missing is the institutional layer, and it won’t form until the regulatory path is clear enough for a firm like Kyobo to commit capital and internal resources without hedging against the possibility that the rules change underneath them.

The consensus, if there was one, is that the tipping point will not look like a breakthrough. It will look like normalcy.

The Transition Phase: How Panelists See 2026

The session’s final stretch shifted the conversation from architecture to conviction. If the rails are still under construction, what might they look like by the end of the year?

Chris Shin did not wait for regulatory certainty at home. Instead, he suggested Kyobo would move where clarity already exists.

“So instead of banking on the local regulators, we want to expand outside of Korea,” he said, outlining plans to establish a digital asset platform in a jurisdiction with a more settled framework. For Shin, progress is less about waiting for permission and more about positioning the firm where experimentation is possible.

Jay Kim’s outlook was more structural. Mirae Asset, he said, is working toward launching a retail platform with tokenized products natively issued on-chain, both in Korea and globally through its integrated systems. But he was candid about trade-offs. He added:

Sherry Zhu focused on regulation as the unlock. In Hong Kong, she expects developments that could allow cross-margin models treating crypto assets more like traditional securities, enabling them to function as collateral and integrate more deeply into brokerage balance sheets.

Ramzy Ali offered the boldest milestone: the first direct IPO listing issued natively on-chain. A fully native listing, he argued, would mark a structural shift rather than a symbolic one.

Zeng Xin declined to make a specific market prediction. Instead, he returned to infrastructure. “The cloud infrastructure becomes invisible when it becomes a success,” he said — a reminder that the most transformative changes may be the ones users never notice.

Labyuk closed the session by returning to the point the panel kept reinforcing. Institutional adoption is no longer a future scenario. It is already being built, component by component, across firms, navigating legacy integration, custody, and compliance in multiple jurisdictions. The rails are still incomplete, but the builders are already at work.