Building the Backbone: Institutional Leaders on Cryptocurrency Infrastructure at Liquidity Summit 2026

In recent years, the crypto and blockchain industry has seen how enterprise adoption has changed everything. The question is no longer whether blockchain technology works, but rather whether the infrastructure behind it can withstand the pressure of institutions when markets witness violent movements, liquidity fragments, or systems fail.

By 2025, BlackRock’s IBIT will exceed $40 billion in cumulative net inflows. U.S. tokenized bonds surpassed $5 billion in market capitalization in March, reaching more than $8 billion in October. Meanwhile, JPMorgan organized a $50 million commercial paper issue on Solana in December, while Goldman Sachs launched tokenized money market funds with BNY Mellon.

Technology has tried its course. The most difficult work remains: preservation engineering, regulatory compatibility, links with legacy systems, and institutional trust, which can only be built with stability and continuity.

The Liquidity 2026 Committee in Hong Kong addressed these questions first-hand with a panel titled “Building Institutional Pathways for a Digital Asset Economy,” putting these questions directly in front of solution makers.

The session was moderated by Alevtna Labyuk, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Pinkrypto, and featured Chris Chen (Director of Global Strategic Partnerships at Qboo Life Insurance), Jay Kim (Senior Director, Digital Asset Business at Mirae Asset Securities), Zheng Chen (Senior Web3 Solutions Architect at AWS), Sherry Zhu and Head of Digital (AsGlo) (Head of DeFi at the Solana Foundation).

Watch the full session discussion here:

The problem of integration that no one can overcome

Jay Kim of Mirae Asset Securities began with a straightforward assessment of where the real obstacles were. Three issues dominated the dialogue. Customer data sovereignty comes first. In Korea and Hong Kong, legal data protection obligations make it impossible to put customer information on a public blockchain. The Mirai solution currently working is a hybrid solution, Kim said.

Explain:

“We protect, we try to keep very sensitive customer information off-chain with all transaction data as well, keeping the blockchain as a representation of the asset itself and the transfer of value,” he said.

Conservation is a more difficult structural problem. Traditional finance is built around custodian banks and central repositories. Digital assets require control of private keys, which requires new internal policies and a trusted security narrative in front of regulators.

There is also the issue of trading platforms. There are hundreds of platforms, some with stablecoins, some with fiat currencies, and some like Hyperliquid that operate entirely on-chain. Accumulating that liquidity requires understanding the structure of each platform individually.

“Achieving the balance is very difficult,” Kim said, adding:

“This is something you have to live with. But it’s something you have to do to move forward with innovation,” he said.

Chris Shin of Qboo Life Insurance added the dimension of institutional inertia. His company solved this challenge with a hybrid model, first building out of the legacy system, testing the concept externally, and then using that test to gain the trust of internal parties and regulators.

“When we have an externally proven model, it’s easier to convince internal stakeholders,” he said.

Advantage of the traditional broker

Enter Vato Holdings, which operates one of the largest financial intermediation platforms in Asia with 28 million users worldwide, in the cryptocurrency market not with the aim of capturing, but with the aim of employing only what the traditional players have.

Sherry Chu explained in two words – confidence and comfort. Regulatory licenses, brand credibility, and established banking relationships achieve something that cannot be easily replicated by native digital exchanges, which are banks that facilitate the flow of traditional funds for cryptocurrency trading. This feature of the traditional money path has a bigger impact than it seems.

I said:

“We have launched spot cryptocurrency trading globally in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United States of America. Last year in Hong Kong, we have already introduced cryptocurrency deposit and withdrawal functionality. So, users who deposit cryptocurrency on our platform can withdraw them and easily use the funds to buy traditional securities,” said Cherry Zhou.

You also face real challenges. Lack of skills stands out as one of the most important. Managing custody, keys and risks on the network requires skills that most financial professionals do not have, and closing this gap takes time. The structural characteristics of the licenses, the compliance structure and the ability to manage multiple assets cannot be easily replicated by the other management.

From the point of view of the protocol layer, Ramzi Ali of the Solana Foundation, explained that the trust of institutions depends on continuity.

Solana transacted $1.6 trillion in trading volume last year and holds nearly $14 billion in liquidity in stablecoins on the first layer of a single state. According to Ali, the uptime and reliability of transactions are more important than theoretical scalability.

“Infrastructure needs ultimately remain constant,” Ali said.

Save In addition to performance, organizations need compliance-friendly tools. Solana introduced a zero-knowledge verification service that allows applications to verify wallet eligibility without exposing private data. It also developed a private execution environment that enables transaction privacy directly at the first layer.

These tools aim to connect centralized finance and decentralized infrastructure without forcing institutions to abandon compliance structures.

As for Zeng Chen from AWS, he introduced the concept of elasticity in business terms.

“People don’t judge institutions on normal days, they judge on volatile days,” Shen said.

Shen described cloud elasticity as “revenue insurance.” For digital asset platforms, sudden spikes in movement, cascading liquidations and volatility events are not rare cases, but frequent realities. The infrastructure must absorb these shocks without disrupting service.

Signs everyone is watching

Maturity emerges quietly in every market. Not through press releases, but through the behavior of the participants when they stop asking if the system works and start assuming that it really does.

The panel offered different opinions on when this time will come for digital assets, but the answers were united by a common theme.

Kim identified the real arrow. They are not tokenized funds, nor derivative products that remotely reference the underlying assets, but actual equity shares embedded in the network and exchanged on public chains. He said:

Ramsay Ali said that once the current equity is converted into tokens on the blockchain, everything that is built on it will also move onto the blockchain.

The importance lies in the sub-message. Consider that listed shares form the basis of most traditional financial products. If these states move to the blockchain, everything that is built on them will also move, not as an option, but as an inevitable result.

The problem was presented to me as a price discovery problem. The price of Bitcoin is currently determined mainly on centralized derivatives platforms. US stock prices are determined by Nasdaq. He asked a simple question: When will the price of an asset of global importance be discovered first on the blockchain?

This will mean that liquidity on the blockchain becomes deeper and not just a parallel path. Institutions stop treating cryptocurrencies as a market for participation and start considering the blockchain itself as the main market.

Zhou focused more on the organizational aspect. It marks the moment when Hong Kong, or any major jurisdiction, officially allows cryptocurrencies to be a margin guarantee on par with traditional securities. This policy change will change accounting, risk management calculations, and ultimately the appetite of organizations in ways that infrastructure alone cannot.

Shin, as usual, returned to the legal framework in Korea. The individual market is already active. What is missing is an institutional layer, and it will only take shape when the regulatory path is clear enough for companies like Qboo to invest capital and internal resources without having to inoculate against the possibility of suddenly changing the rules.

The participants concluded that if there was consensus, the turning point would not seem like a sudden glance, but rather like something natural.

Transition: How panelists see 2026

In the final phase of the session, the discussion moved from market structure to conviction. If the infrastructure is still under construction, how will it be by the end of the year?

Chris Shane did not wait for regulatory certainty in his country. Instead, he suggested, Kyobo would move where clarity already exists.

Shin said that instead of relying on local regulators, they want to expand outside of Korea, outlining plans to create a digital asset platform in a jurisdiction with a more stable regulatory framework. For Shane, progress is not about waiting for permission, but about positioning the company where experimentation is possible.

Jae Kim’s vision was more structural. He said Mirae Asset is currently working on launching a platform for individuals with tokenized products natively issued on the blockchain, both in Korea and globally through its integrated systems. But he was frank about the concessions, adding:

Jae Kim said that there may be some compromise as many of the benefits of decentralization … may have to be in some way with the traditional system. We are in a transition phase.

Sherry Zhou focused on the organization as the decisive factor. In Hong Kong, developments could be expected to allow cross-asset margin models that treat crypto assets as traditional securities, allowing them to act as collateral and become deeper in the balance sheets of brokerage companies.

Ramsay Ali presented an even bolder milestone: the first direct IPO to be listed natively on the blockchain. He said the full original list would be a structural change and not just a symbolic step.

Zeng Chen declined to provide a specific market forecast. Instead, he turned to the infrastructure, explaining that the cloud architecture becomes invisible when it succeeds – a reminder that the most impactful transformations can be those that users do not feel.

Labyuk concluded the session by returning to a point that the team was always emphasizing. He emphasized that enterprise adoption is no longer a future scenario, but is already being built, component by component, in companies, with the integration of legacy systems, custody and compliance challenges faced in many jurisdictions. He noted that the infrastructure is still incomplete, but the builders have already started work.