“With each ETF that’s gone live, the money’s a lot more sticky,” in the words of Canary Capital’s CEO Steven McClurg. 

This idea represents one of the clearest takeaways from Consensus Hong Kong this year: we’ve finally reached the era of long-term allocation. 

Consensus Hong Kong 2026 (Feb 10-12, 2026) brought 11,000 registered attendees from 122+ countries and regions to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Senior leadership made up a significant share of the audience, along with allocators, operators, and infrastructure builders.

“Digital Assets. Institutional Scale.” was reflected in the programming, and met well on the ground. Panels centered on institutional adoption, stablecoin infrastructure, and the architecture of internet capital markets. There was also a visible attempt to connect blockchain infrastructure with AI agents and robotics, but even those discussions returned to the same constraint: execution and reliability.

What stood out early was how consistently conversations returned to market infrastructure. Across the Future of Finance Summit, the Global Bitcoin Summit, and the Advanced Trading track, it’s clear that the next phase in Web3 is about proving it can operate at scale, under real capital, without breaking.

Sticky money, soft regulation and a dominant U.S. narrative 

McClurg used Canary’s own XRP product to illustrate what he meant by ‘stickier’ capital.

“We launched an XRP ETF last year, and even on the biggest down days of the market, we were still getting inflows – meaning that people see an opportunity, they’re buying it.”

Of course, if capital continues to flow in during drawdowns, the market dynamic changes. 

The mood at Consensus was the product of such a change, beginning in earnest with the SEC’s approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024. Naturally, once exposure could be accessed through a familiar asset, things were shaken up. 

As ETF pipelines expanded in the U.S., so did the institutional looking glass. Liquidity quality started to matter more than raw volume, hedging tools became part of the discussion, and market structure moved from the periphery to the center.

Regulation came up repeatedly in Hong Kong, but in a specific tone.

McClurg described the U.S. shift as real, though not fully codified into statute.

“Most of it’s happened, but it’s soft regulation… not necessarily laws that are being passed. It’s via executive orders. It’s via appointments.”

In other words, posture and precedent are shaping the environment as much as formal legislation.

That aligns with developments in Washington since early 2025: executive actions outlining national digital asset frameworks and a reshaped SEC leadership publicly signaling a more workable approach to crypto oversight.

The result is a market that feels more procedural and predictable. That’s what institutions require before size follows – a topic also well discussed at Consensus’ “The Regulatory Shift” panel at the Convergence Stage.

Institutional anxiety about whether the infrastructure is real

Volatility no longer seems to scare serious allocators. At the event, this idea felt like a misconception for the first time. 

Cory Loo, Head of APAC at Douro Labs and lead for APAC business development for Pyth Network, commented on this point:

“Institutions understand volatility. What still quietly worries them is whether crypto’s infrastructure and business models are actually institutional-grade – not in marketing language, but in measurable terms. They want to see real revenue, real customers, real compliance, real uptime.”

The hesitation, in his view, is that parts of the industry can still look larger than they are: activity that appears significant on the surface, but doesn’t hold up when institutions pressure-test durability, unit economics, and operational maturity.

That framing matched the agenda-level emphasis at Consensus. The “Advanced Trading” programming was positioned around liquidity mechanics, security considerations, and a shifting regulatory landscape, including the role of cross-chain solutions and emerging protocols in making markets more transparent and efficient.

It felt as though being ‘institutional-grade’ has become a default requirement for projects in the space. Uptime, incident response, governance, and compliance aren’t secondary concerns anymore. 

That is also why infrastructure providers that can point to hard usage metrics have gained an edge in these conversations. Pyth Network, for instance, publicly says it has integrated 600+ protocols across 100+ blockchains and delivers thousands of price feeds, with a growing share tied to real-world assets.

Self-custody, the education gap, and why aggregation is becoming the default

One of the more useful signals at Consensus came from Andrey Fedorov, CMO & CBDO of STON.fi Dev, in an exclusive interview with BeInCrypto. He spoke to a product-design tradeoff, where DeFi teams either optimize for user acquisition speed or for principles that hold up when capital and scrutiny arrive:

“We could grow faster if we compromised on custody. But then we wouldn’t be building DeFi infrastructure – we’d be building another fintech layer.”

As more regulated capital comes into the market, the bar rises for what counts as acceptable custody, acceptable risk, and acceptable operational responsibility. A self-custody-first posture is not always the easiest route to distribution, but it seems from the event that that’s what the industry is focusing on building. 

Fedorov also put a spotlight on an interesting adoption blocker:

“If someone loses their seed phrase, we can’t restore access. We don’t have it. We’ve never had it. But quite often users still come to us expecting support, like they would from a bank or centralized exchange.” 

Essentially, the industry is still training users to understand what self-custody means. It’s clear that work on education is part of the cost of building non-custodial systems at scale.

Fedorov came prepared with a solution, however – distribution and aggregation:

“Make things easier for those who don’t want to think about technical stuff. Get wider distribution by integrating into all the apps. And aggregate liquidity from multiple blockchains, not just one. That’s the roadmap. Now it’s about scaling it.” 

That’s also exactly how Consensus framed advanced trading this year – with cross-chain solutions and new protocols positioned as drivers of efficiency and accessibility. 

Here, in STON.fi’s case, we could highlight Omniston, which the team positions as a liquidity aggregation protocol designed for TON, connecting multiple liquidity sources through a single integration.

Hong Kong’s welcomes institutional scale, with training wheels

Of course, many of the conference’s institutional conversations centered on the U.S. ETFs, precedent, and what McClurg called “soft regulation”. However, Consensus Hong Kong also had a clear local narrative running through the main stage. Hong Kong wants to be a global hub for digital assets, but it wants that growth routed through licensing, investor protection, and risk management.

In his opening address, John Lee (Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR) pitched Hong Kong’s approach as deliberately “steady and sustainable,” pointing to an actively built regulatory framework and a policy direction aimed at turning Web3 potential into real financial-market outcomes.

This all became a little more concrete in remarks by Paul Chan (Financial Secretary), who laid out what the government sees as the major institutional-facing trends: tokenization of real-world assets moving from proof-of-concept to deployment; deeper interaction between TradFi and DeFi (with DeFi also facing growing regulatory pressure); and the accelerating overlap between AI and digital assets, including early ‘machine economy’ concepts where autonomous systems transact on-chain.

Consensus 2026 proved that capital is willing to engage, but it demands environments where rules are legible, and intermediaries are accountable.

Stablecoins and tokenization

Lee also tied Hong Kong’s “hub” ambition directly to its new stablecoin regime. He pointed to the Stablecoins Ordinance and said the HKMA was already processing applications, with the first batch of fiat-referenced stablecoin issuer licences expected “within the next month.”

Eddie Yue, the HKMA’s Chief Executive, separately told lawmakers the first batch is expected in March 2026, and that only a “very small number” of licences will be granted initially. The emphasis is on use cases, risk controls, AML, and reserve backing.

Chan used his keynote to explain what this approach means for institutions. Tokenization is moving from proof-of-concept to deployment, led by on-chain versions of familiar instruments such as government bonds and money market funds. 

He supported that framing with local metrics. These included Hong Kong’s tokenized green bond programme, banks holding over HK$14 billion in digital assets under custody by the end of 2025, and tokenized deposits reaching HK$29 billion.

Separately, a main stage conversation on RWA tokenization brought together senior leaders from Securitize, Ondo, and J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys dove deep into how Real World Assets are increasingly being treated as part of familiar institutional categories. 

From the event, it was clear that payments, settlement, and regulated issuance are now the main competitive arena. Even the “Machine Economy” discussions (AI agents, robotics, on-chain execution) kept coming back to licensed issuers, enforceable AML and controls, and auditability, among other things. 

Risk appetite is back, but it’s not unconditional

The simplest way to describe where the market is heading is that institutional adoption is becoming a procurement game. The checks are on compliance posture, governance, uptime, incident response, and whether the business model survives scrutiny once you strip out cyclical volume.

Two signals made the direction clear. The agenda leaned hard into market structure (liquidity, security, regulation, and cross-chain execution) and made the point that enterprise-grade crypto infrastructure only works with regulatory backing, with Hong Kong’s stablecoin licensing push as the clearest example.

Indeed, risk appetite is returning, but it’s conditional. Capital will move faster when the foundations behave predictably. After all, that’s what makes crypto legible to investment committees and survivable under stress. 

Looking ahead to Consensus Miami (May 5-7, 2026), the agenda is set to dive further into stablecoins, tokenization, capital markets, and regulation, with dedicated programming for Bitcoin (including mining and institutional strategy) plus formats like Wealth Management Day, Stablecoin University, PitchFest, and the Hackathon.