institution

Paul Frambot, co-founder and CEO of Morpho, tweeted that he has been in intensive contact with several large institutions over the past week to understand the current DeFi situation. The main conclusions are twofold:The interest of institutions in DeFi will not disappear, as the fund distributors will not leave. The massive assets under management (AUM), payment, and lending businesses are migrating en masse to on-chain, and fintech companies hope to fully go on-chain, leaving institutions with no choice.Nevertheless, institutions have completely lost trust in the liquidity pool model. They want to have control over the code, risk management, and compliance, allowing them to flexibly choose the necessary parts while accessing a globally compatible liquidity network.Paul Frambot believes that the commitment to open financial systems will not fail, as it will create tremendous value for all participants.

Colombia's largest pension management institution, Porvenir, has launched a crypto investment portfolio that allows members to gain indirect exposure to Bitcoin prices by investing in BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, IBIT.The minimum investment for this product is 100,000 Colombian pesos (approximately $25), aimed at savers aged 18 to 45, and is only available for the voluntary pension system, requiring a personalized risk assessment consultation.

Sky announced that it is building Laniakea, a standardized infrastructure framework for institutional-level capital deployment, for its Sky Agent Network.Currently, Sky Protocol manages over $11 billion in USDS circulation and generates returns through strategies such as DeFi lending, private credit, and compliant real-world assets. Laniakea will serve as the underlying infrastructure to enhance the scalability and efficiency of capital allocation, further advancing on-chain finance towards institutional levels. The project aims to address the current issue of over $300 billion in idle stablecoins and the lack of unified infrastructure.Laniakea will achieve standardization from four dimensions: smart contracts, risk and governance, data infrastructure, and legal compliance, allowing new capital products to avoid redundant construction of underlying frameworks, thus enabling modular expansion and scalable deployment. At the same time, through unified risk measurement and loss layering mechanisms, it ensures that risks are transparent and responsibilities are clear.Under this framework, Sky Agents (Primes) will develop investment strategies and compete for capital allocation based on unified standards, while specific products (Halos) will quickly land based on shared infrastructure. Laniakea will also encode the entire protocol's operational status in a machine-readable manner, providing a foundation for AI-driven real-time risk control and capital scheduling.As the capital scale expands and returns increase, Sky expects to strengthen the value capture capability of the SKY token through buyback and staking mechanisms.

According to monitoring by Omar Faridi, the net demand from institutional investors for Bitcoin has regained strong momentum, reaching the highest growth rate since the end of 2025.Data from Bloomberg, Glassnode, and Bitwise Europe shows that the buying power of professional institutions such as funds and asset management companies significantly exceeds selling pressure. Industry analysis points out that institutional funds typically feature large transactions and long-term holdings, and the renewed acceleration of their net demand indicates an increased confidence among large players in Bitcoin as a store of value. Currently, the rise in institutional participation is driving improvements in market liquidity and is seen as a signal of Bitcoin's further solidification in the global financial system.

Morpho CEO Paul Frambot posted on X, stating that over the past week, he communicated with several large institutions to understand their views on the current DeFi situation. The core conclusions are as follows.First, institutional interest will not disappear. The reason is simple: distribution channels will not vanish ------ massive assets under management (AUM), payment, and lending operations are moving on-chain. Almost all fintech companies aim for full on-chain integration. For institutions, this is not a question of "whether" but "a must."Second, they have lost trust in the pool/hub model. Institutions and distributors want to control everything, including control over the code, control over risks, and control over compliance. At the same time, they also want flexibility, meaning the ability to isolate their own business and connect to a global liquidity network that is compatible with them.

According to CoinDesk, the open interest (OI) of the Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund IBIT under BlackRock once surged to $27.61 billion, surpassing the $26.9 billion scale of the Bitcoin options market on the crypto derivatives platform Deribit for the first time. Analysts believe this milestone indicates that the institutionalization process of the Bitcoin market in the United States is accelerating.Additionally, according to Volmex data, the open interest volume of IBIT call options suggests that its call options primarily expect the Bitcoin trading price to rise to $109,709, which is about 41% higher than the current market price of $77,400. Furthermore, the average expiration date of IBIT options is also about two months longer than that of Deribit, indicating stronger bullish sentiment and a preference for longer-term holdings.

The Humanity Foundation has recently made significant adjustments to the $H token allocation plan, requiring investors to make a final choice between two options by April 26 at 09:00 UTC: one, extend the distribution, pushing the Cliff to September 25, 2026, and changing to equal distribution over 12 quarters; two, a 3:10 discounted immediate unlock, replacing the original 16,666,666 tokens with 5,000,000 $H (a 70% reduction), to be fully distributed on June 25, 2026.It is understood that the Humanity Foundation has sent adjustment notifications to over 100 investors. Early investment firm Trix Ventures has publicly disclosed its choice of the discounted immediate unlock.It is reported that this firm invested during the project's valuation phase of approximately $60 million, and even after the 3:10 discounted replacement, it can still achieve about 7 times return. Notably, the Humanity Protocol previously reached an in-depth cooperation with payment giant Mastercard, and the project's fundamentals have received endorsement from traditional financial institutions. The on-chain identity verification sector it belongs to is currently in its early market stage, but with the continuous expansion of AI-generated content and automated accounts, the demand for on-chain real identity verification is widely believed to grow exponentially, giving this sector long-term potential to become a leading project in the Web3 infrastructure field.The project is about to face a test of significant selling pressure from a one-time massive unlock, and whether it can grow explosively alongside the AI sector is crucial. Analysts point out that choosing the one-time unlock on June 25 is a safer decision. In the current market cycle, "certain liquidity" far outweighs paper numbers. The deferred plan extends the cycle to 3 years, with huge uncertainties regarding the protocol's survival and team stability.From a market structure perspective, June 25 faces obvious concentrated selling pressure risks: the Sablier contract release node is transparent on-chain, and quantitative and short-selling funds will precisely target this node; institutions may lock in profits by hedging in advance during the two-month window; market makers may withdraw buy depth in advance, causing the actual realization value to be less than 10% of the nominal value. Historically, large-scale concentrated unlocks of Starknet (STRK) and ApeCoin (APE) have triggered severe selling pressure, with the former dropping over 95% from its peak and the latter declining 77% within 7 months.

According to CoinDesk, Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor stated "Winter's over" when Bitcoin was around $78,000. Analyst Mati Greenspan pointed out that the previous "flash crash" was more of a correction in a bull market, and he believes the bottom for Bitcoin has been reached, with the next phase of growth driven by "national-level adoption," including central banks incorporating BTC into reserves alongside gold.The report mentioned that the U.S. government currently holds about 300,000 BTC and is discussing the establishment of a strategic Bitcoin reserve; El Salvador continues to purchase daily, and Bitcoin has also been included in asset allocations by the UK government and some state-level pension funds in the U.S.

Coinbase Institutional tweeted that its March market cycle survey shows that among institutional investors, 43% believe we are currently in the late bear market; among non-institutional investors (retail), 49% believe we are still in the bear market markdown phase.

According to The Block, JPMorgan analysts stated that the frequent security incidents in DeFi and the stagnation of total locked value (TVL) in ETH terms continue to limit institutional interest in DeFi. The report mentioned that a recent cross-chain bridge attack related to Kelp DAO led to a loss of approximately $20 billion in DeFi TVL within a few days. The attackers minted about $292 million in unsecured rsETH and borrowed real ETH on Aave using it as collateral, resulting in approximately $230 million in bad debt. JPMorgan also pointed out that after security incidents, users tend to turn to Tether's USDT for safety.

The crypto lobbying organization Blockchain Association, along with CCI and more than 120 industry institutions including Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken, and Circle, jointly sent a letter to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee urging the acceleration of the review process for the CLARITY Act.Industry representatives stated that the U.S. needs to establish a unified regulatory framework for the digital asset market, clarify regulatory responsibilities, and strengthen investor protection. Relying solely on law enforcement and regulation cannot create a long-term stable environment. Institutions warned that prolonged policy ambiguity will lead to the outflow of capital, talent, and technology, weakening the strategic advantage of the U.S., while also calling for the development of appropriate federal unified regulatory rules for stablecoins, tokenized assets, and decentralized technologies.

Chief Economist Fu Peng of New Fire Group delivered a speech at the 2026 Hong Kong Institutional Digital Wealth Management Summit, stating that the integration of traditional financial institutions and the cryptocurrency market will herald the arrival of a new era in the market. The participants who will truly succeed in the future are those who can quickly complete their transformation at critical turning points.Fu Peng cited the Cold War, oil crisis, and the simultaneous rise of computer and semiconductor technology in the 1970s and 1980s as examples, pointing out that technological advancements and global order turmoil often go hand in hand, with risks and opportunities always accompanying each other. He believes that AI and data computing power are now widely recognized as the core productive forces of the next era, indicating that the first half of the cryptocurrency industry has essentially ended, and the industry is at a critical stage of reconstruction and rebirth.Looking ahead, Fu Peng predicts that stablecoins will take on payment functions, Bitcoin will evolve into a core asset with both value storage and financial transaction attributes, and a brand new chapter of the era is about to begin.

According to PR Newswire, Valour, a subsidiary of DeFi Technologies, has secured approximately $11 million in institutional investment to purchase its Hedera (HBAR) related ETP products, with about $10 million corresponding to products listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and about $1 million corresponding to Valour Hedera SEK listed on the Swedish Spotlight Exchange.DeFi Technologies stated that these two transactions were facilitated by its Abu Dhabi seminar, reflecting the growing institutional demand for gaining exposure to Hedera through regulated exchange-traded products and supporting its asset management growth in the German market.

Gate held the Institutional Circle event in Hong Kong, focusing on the theme "AI Reshaping Crypto Liquidity & Market Access," gathering several institutional representatives from the Asia-Pacific region to discuss the evolution of the crypto market structure and the path to liquidity reshaping. Gate's founder and CEO Dr. Han attended the event and interacted with institutional guests on-site.At the event, Gate's Global Institutional Head Addis Hu delivered the opening speech and shared insights on the platform's service capabilities and market changes in the context of deepening institutional participation. AWS Senior Regional Business Development Manager Ethan Hui shared industry insights from the perspectives of technical infrastructure and asset services.During the discussion session, attendees engaged in in-depth discussions on the evolution of liquidity, changes in market structure, and trends in multi-asset allocation against the backdrop of continuous institutional capital inflow. Overall, this event provided institutions with a reference for understanding current market structure changes and future allocation logic, further reflecting that the industry is moving towards a more mature and structured development stage.

This week, the UK-related economic development agency invited the management of the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit to London to meet with representatives from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the House of Lords to discuss topics such as cryptocurrency regulation, business establishment, and employment.Bybit CEO Ben Zhou stated that the UK side hopes to attract large companies to establish bases locally and promote innovation through stablecoins, tokenization, and payment system reforms. Reports indicate that this invitation coincides with the UK's FinTech Week and reflects the UK's intention to reverse the trend of funds and businesses flowing to the UAE.

Gate will hold the "Institutional Circle: Al Reshaping Crypto Liquidity & Market Access" institutional exchange event in Hong Kong, aimed at institutional participants, focusing on discussions related to "AI Reshaping Crypto Liquidity and Market Structure." The event will invite institutional founders and business leaders from the Asia-Pacific region to explore the direction of industry evolution from a practical perspective.On the day of the event, Addis Hu, Global Head of Institutions at Gate, will deliver the opening speech and a keynote address; Ethan Hui, Senior Regional Business Development Manager at AWS, and Chen Zhao, Executive Director of Digital Assets and CEO of FinChain, will also attend as special guests and give speeches.In addition, the event will include registration and gift distribution, free networking, and a dinner segment, providing attendees with opportunities for in-depth communication and resource connection, further promoting institutional collaboration and industry cooperation.