Institutional participation moved from early engagement toward more operational, long-term involvement.
In 2025, progress across the Sui ecosystem began to compound, as improvements built on one another rather than landing in isolation, making new developments easier to adopt and more immediately useful.
That pattern was also visible in the evolution of the Sui Stack itself, as core layers matured in parallel rather than advancing in isolation. Those developments — explored in our End of Year piece on the Sui Stack — laid the groundwork for ecosystem-wide progress.
As that foundation took hold, its effects became increasingly visible beyond the core protocol. Payment rails matured, BTC-backed assets on Sui gained wider traction, and institutional participation deepened toward more practical, operational involvement.
This article is part of our End of Year series, which reflects on 2025 from different perspectives. Here, the focus is on progress around payment rails, BTC-backed assets, and institutional participation, and what that shift means for Sui’s next phase of growth.
By the end of 2024, Sui supported a growing set of native and ecosystem stablecoins — including USDC, AUSD, FDUSD, and USDY — giving users multiple options for stable value as the ecosystem entered 2025.
This year, suiUSDe was announced as a new addition, introducing an income-generating, Sui-native stable asset backed by Ethena’s infrastructure. While not yet live, it points toward a more ecosystem-aligned stablecoin model alongside existing options.
With a broader range of stablecoin options in place, Sui-based payments took a meaningful step toward real-world use. Integrations with platforms like xMoney and xPortal extended Sui-based payments into consumer contexts through virtual Mastercard support. Regional efforts such as next-generation KRW stablecoin payments with t’order demonstrated how these rails could adapt to local markets.
As a result, payments increasingly felt like a dependable layer rather than a constraint. Stable value and settlement became closer to defaults, allowing teams to focus more on user experience and product logic, and less on stitching together financial infrastructure.
Bitcoin Finance emerged as one of the clearest areas of momentum in 2025. At the start of the year, BTC-backed assets on Sui were still limited in scope and availability. By the end of the year, multiple representations of Bitcoin were active across the ecosystem, giving BTC holders several practical ways to participate in DeFi on Sui.
That progress took shape through a few distinct paths:
Taken together, these paths broadened Bitcoin Finance on Sui into an environment where BTC-backed assets could be put to work across a wider range of use cases. Bitcoin increasingly functioned as a first-class participant across trading, lending, and liquidity markets, rather than being treated as an external asset limited to narrower integrations.
Institutional involvement followed a similar trajectory. In 2024, firms such as VanEck, Franklin Templeton, and Grayscale launched or announced regulated products tied to Sui, establishing early credibility and signaling institutional confidence in the network.
In 2025, that early interest translated into more concrete forms of participation.
ETF-related milestones from firms like 21Shares and Canary, alongside infrastructure partnerships with providers such as Fireblocks, reflected a shift toward greater operational readiness and long-term engagement.
At the same time, real-world asset initiatives broadened the scope of institutional use cases on Sui. Tokenized investment products, commodities, and yield-bearing instruments began to appear alongside more traditional DeFi activity, reinforcing Sui’s role as infrastructure capable of supporting a wider range of financial assets.
By the end of the year, institutional engagement on Sui looked less like testing the waters and more like laying the groundwork for Sui to be a major access point in capital markets.
By the end of 2025, the ecosystem told a clearer story than it had at the start of the year. Payments advanced meaningfully. Bitcoin-backed assets were active across multiple paths. Institutions were participating with long-term intent.
More importantly, these advances were no longer happening in isolation. Stablecoins supported payments, payments supported applications, and deeper liquidity enabled more sophisticated financial activity. Together, this created a reinforcing cycle, where progress in one area made the next easier to build and adopt.
As Sui moves into 2026, the ecosystem is not simply adding new pieces, but building forward from what’s already in place. Momentum is beginning to compound, with real-world use and participation reinforcing the foundations laid this year and carrying the network into its next phase of growth. Because what comes next is being built right now.
