Scaling Onchain Finance for Real Money

‍Speakers

Institutional-Grade Crypto: No More Excuses

• Clarisse Hagège, Cofounder & CEO at DFNS
• ​Hong Kim, Cofounder & CTO at Bitwise
• ​Rand Hindi ​‍, Cofounder and CEO at Zama

‍What It Takes for Institutions to Go All-In

• ​Christine Moy, Head of Digital Assets, Data & AI Strategy at Apollo
• ​Charles Jansen, Managing Director, Digital Assets & DeFi at S&P Global
• ​​Dan Ross, Cofounder & CTO at Native

The regulatory unlock is real and it changes everything

• For the first time, regulatory uncertainty is no longer the #1 blocker for professional allocators. The US administration's pro-innovation stance has shifted the debate from "if" to "how."
• Morgan Stanley's entry into crypto custody and ETFs during the bear market signals a structural, not cyclical, shift.
• Bitwise launched its first on-chain vault products in 2025, enabled by a US regulator explicitly willing to let firms build and iterate, rather than wait for complete rule clarity.

Privacy is the final frontier for institutional adoption

• Bitcoin solved decentralisation. Solana solved scalability. Privacy is now the last major barrier to large-scale institutional use of public blockchains.
• Without confidential transactions, institutions cannot move significant capital on-chain without telegraphing their strategies to the entire market and being front-run.
• Technologies like Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) are now fast enough for real use (hundreds of TPS today, projected 100,000+ TPS on dedicated ASICs), making privacy a compute problem, not a science problem.

Public chains with privacy > private chains

• The industry is converging toward a consensus: the right answer is public blockchains with a privacy layer, not permissioned/private ledgers.
• Institutions choosing private chains today risk building on infrastructure that will not scale or interoperate with the broader ecosystem.
• Custodians and infrastructure providers are rebuilding governance and control layers off-chain, while keeping asset lifecycle on-chain, a practical hybrid that satisfies compliance requirements without sacrificing efficiency.

Stablecoins are the real driver of on-chain asset management

• On-chain asset management is accelerating primarily because of stablecoins: dollars are already moving on-chain at scale, and those dollars need investment products.
• Vaults are emerging as the fund wrapper of the on-chain world: stablecoins flow in, RWAs and yield strategies flow out, a familiar structure in an unfamiliar format.
• Stablecoin supply is expected to grow from ~$300bn today to $3 trillion within two to three years, representing an enormous surface area for new products.

Risk is multi-layered and institutions are only beginning to map it

• Traditional credit and market risk frameworks apply on-chain, but must be supplemented with smart contract risk, oracle risk, protocol risk, and the cascading dynamics of DeFi composability.
• Unlike traditional finance, incidents in DeFi are public and immediate, there is no "fix it quietly" option. Reputational damage is irreversible, and funds can be drained in seconds.
• The Resolve exploit illustrated that even 14 audits from 5 different firms is no guarantee. Standards for what constitutes a smart contract audit barely exist yet.

DeFi insurance: finally fit for purpose, but still expensive

• Regulated DeFi insurance products have only existed in meaningful form for the past 18 months. Pricing has dropped sharply, from ~20% rates at peak to 2.5–10% today but remains prohibitive for many use cases.
• The bottleneck is expertise, not appetite: a handful of specialists globally are dragging the rest of the insurance market forward.
• New coalition models (combining regulated insurers, Nexus Mutual, and real-time risk monitoring platforms like Hypernative) are beginning to offer data-driven, fit-for-purpose institutional policies.
• The final unsolved risk: a compliant, frictionless onboarding experience for regulated DeFi products. KYC/AML/suitability layers remain clunky and someone needs to build a delightful version.

2026: the year of catch-up or miss the wave

• The top 20–25 global institutions have been building digital asset teams for 5–6 years. Everyone else is playing catch-up now, under time pressure.
• The pace of change has fundamentally accelerated: what used to take 5–10 years now happens in months. Bitwise's entire 8-year history of progress may be replicated in the next 2 years.
• Institutions that don't build internal expertise now skilled teams who understand the full stack from backend infrastructure to product structuring will not be able to scale in 2026 and beyond.

Conclusion

Institutional DeFi has moved beyond the proof-of-concept phase. The infrastructure exists, the regulatory environment is unlocking, and the capital is ready. What remains are three interlocking challenges: privacy at scale, risk frameworks that keep pace with protocol innovation, and compliance tooling that doesn't kill the user experience. The firms that solve these, or partner with those who do, will define the next cycle of digital asset adoption.