Building The Backbone: Institutional Leaders On Crypto’s Infrastructure At Liquidity Summit 2026

What Happened

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 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).

“Globally, we have launched crypto spot trading in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the US. And last year in Hong Kong, we actually launched the crypto deposit and withdrawal functions. So, for people who deposit crypto on our platform, they can off-ramp it and seamlessly use the funds to buy traditional securities.”

Market Context

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why It Matters

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.

Watch the full panel discussion here:

Details

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:

“We’re protecting, we’re trying to keep the client’s very sensitive information off-chain with all the transactional data as well, while we maintain the blockchain as the representation of the asset itself and also the transfer of value.”

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.

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

“It’s something you need to cope with. But it is something you need to do to move forward with the innovation.”

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.

She explained:

Infrastructure: Consistency Over Hype

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