Crypto business needs to be dressed

Comment by: Neil Staunton, CEO and Co-Founder of Superset

Crypto is one of the most innovative angles of finance. New protocols are launched every week. New market designs are constantly being tested, and the testing moves quickly. But innovation alone cannot build a financial system that institutions can trust.

There's a reason why traditional finance is deliberately boring. It should not be about emotions or surprises. When money is involved, reliability is more important than novelty. Predictable settlement, uniform pricing and clear risk boundaries allow capital to move freely. Without them, even the most beautiful technology will be left aside.

This is where crypto falls short. Today's onchain market structure is insufficient to support it. This is not about institutions not “getting it” (because they certainly are), but getting it where they are.

The infrastructure is there, but the ideology needs some help

Institutional hesitancy towards crypto is often framed as a cultural divide, but this is a misnomer. Banks, asset managers and payment providers are always embracing new technology. Whether it's real-time payment rails or cloud-based mainstream banking systems, they're open to innovation as long as they work in a secure, repeatable and scalable manner.

The issue holding cryptocurrency back from institutional adoption isn't just self-governance or deep decentralization, but a core industry problem: liquidity fragmentation.

Currently, liquidity is dispersed across chains, locations and execution areas. Capital cannot be shared, and therefore, needs to be multiplied. This leads to inconsistent pricing, high volatility and difficulty defining (let alone managing) risk. It's a problem that's been talked about a lot over the past few years, but not reliably solved.

These issues are structural rather than mere philosophical differences. Institutions will continue to test cautiously until they find a solution.

Market structure is very important

Regulation and user experience often dominate the crypto adoption discourse. And it is true that both are important and should be properly addressed. From an institutional point of view, market structure is a stumbling block in the way of adoption.

At the quantitative level, financial systems must handle dollars and FX properly. They must support deep liquidity, tight spreads and predictable performance even under stress. They should behave the same way yesterday, today and tomorrow – and every day to come. But when liquidity is distributed, none of these can happen.

Even well-capitalized institutions struggle to deploy meaningfully if performance depends on risk, duplicate margins, or inconsistent settlement methods. The result is higher costs, unclear vulnerabilities, and hesitance at scale. Simply put, this is a colossal failure of coordination.

Institutions need reliability

Traditional finance prefers the old systems, because they are proven, familiar and reliable. If the crypto industry wants to attract institutions, it must make reliability a primary design constraint.

Yes, some are skeptical about crypto, but the only way to prove them wrong is by repeating the belief and actually being a little boring. He needs to show that he can do the same thing, the same way, in many different situations. This is what institutions look for when evaluating infrastructure. They must be fully confident that the risk is visible, that liquidity is real, and that performance will perform as expected.

Transition period

A matter of time. Nowadays, people believe that the financial system needs to undergo major changes. Institutions are demanding infrastructure that frees up tied-up capital and delivers predictable performance in an increasingly fragmented system.

RELATED: Animoka's Yat Siu Says Crypto Must Grow Eventually

Stablecoins are increasingly used as payment rails rather than entry-level crypto tools. Currently worth nearly $1 trillion a year, the process is expected to rise 690 percent year-over-year by 2025. At the same time, financial institutions have begun to test, integrate and build stablecoins on their books. Even the US Federal Reserve is now analyzing how Strycoin's growth will reshape bank financing and credit availability, a change that is not hypothetical but is already affecting the faucets of the primary market.

This change will change the question. It is no longer the case that crypto can coexist with traditional finance; It's whether the infrastructure is ready to support it.

What does “growing up” mean?

Maturity doesn't mean crypto needs to lean toward centralization or abandon self-governance or integration. This means coordination should be prioritized where markets need it: shared liquidity, consistent pricing and capital efficiency. At the same time, decentralization should be placed where it really matters.

This is about functionality in flash when it comes to designing systems. In finance, brilliant ideas are far less common than they are believed to be.

This is not a capitulation to corporate interests.

Dressing up doesn't mean losing your crypto identity. Crypto has so far focused on proving what is possible, but it must realize that this next phase is about proving what works.

The future of crypto is not defined by how many radical voices; Real capital is defined by operational consistency when online. That's not selling – it's growing.

Comment by: Neil Staunton, CEO and Co-Founder of Superset.