Opinion by: Neil Staunton, CEO and co-founder of Superset

Crypto is one of the most innovative corners of finance. New protocols launch every week. New market designs are constantly tested, and experimentation moves fast. But innovation alone can’t build financial systems that institutions can rely on.

There’s a reason traditional finance is deliberately boring. It shouldn’t be a rollercoaster of emotions or surprises. When money is involved, reliability is much more important than novelty. Predictable settlement, consistent pricing and clear risk boundaries are what allow capital to move at scale. Without them, even the most elegant tech remains sidelined.

This is where crypto falls short. Today’s onchain market structure simply isn’t enough to support it. This is not about institutions “not getting it” (because they definitely are), but rather, it’s about meeting them where they are.

The infrastructure is there, but the ideology needs some help

Institutional hesitation toward crypto is often framed as a cultural divide, but this is a mistranslation. Banks, asset managers and payment providers adopt new technology all the time. Whether it’s real-time payment rails or cloud-based core banking systems, they’re open to innovation as long as it works reliably, repeatably and at scale.

The issue that’s been holding crypto back from institutional adoption is not merely self-custody or deeper decentralization but is actually a core industry problem: liquidity fragmentation.

Currently, liquidity is scattered across chains, venues and execution environments. Capital cannot be shared, and therefore, it needs to be duplicated. This leads to inconsistent pricing, higher slippage and risk being difficult to define (let alone manage). It’s a problem that’s been talked about a lot over the last few years, but hasn’t reliably been solved.

These issues are structural, rather than mere philosophical differences. Until they’re addressed, institutions will continue to experiment cautiously.

Market structure matters most

Regulation and user experience often dominate the crypto adoption conversation. And it’s true that both are important and need to be properly addressed. From an institutional perspective, market structure is a bottleneck that’s getting in the way of adoption.

At scale, financial systems must handle dollars and FX with precision. They must support deep liquidity, tight spreads and predictable execution even under stress. They need to behave the same way yesterday, today and tomorrow — and every day to come. But when liquidity is fragmented, none of this is possible.

Even well-capitalized institutions struggle to meaningfully deploy when execution depends on bridging risk, duplicated margin or inconsistent settlement paths. The result is higher costs, unclear exposures and hesitation to scale participation. Simply put, this is a massive failure of coordination.

Institutions need reliability

Traditional finance prefers its older systems because they have proven themselves, are familiar and dependable. If the crypto industry wants to attract institutions, it’ll need to make reliability a first-class design constraint.

Yes, some are skeptical of crypto, but the only way to prove them wrong is by earning trust through repetition and, frankly, being a bit boring. It needs to show that it can do the same thing, the same way, under a large variety of conditions. This is what institutions look for when they evaluate infrastructure. They need to be totally confident that risk is visible, liquidity is real and execution will behave as expected.

A moment of transition

Timing matters. Right now, people believe that the financial system needs to make significant changes. Institutions are demanding infrastructure that frees trapped capital and delivers predictable execution across an increasingly fragmented system.

Related: Animoca’s Yat Siu says crypto finally has to grow up

Stablecoins are becoming increasingly used as payment rails rather than entry-level crypto tools. They currently process close to $1 trillion a year, with a volume surge of 690% year-over-year in 2025. At the same time, financial institutions have started testing, integrating and building stablecoins into their books. Even the US Federal Reserve now analyzes how stablecoin growth reshapes bank funding and credit provision, underscoring that this shift is not hypothetical but already influencing core market plumbing.

This shift changes the question. It’s no longer whether crypto can coexist with traditional finance; it’s whether its infrastructure is ready to support it.

What “growing up” actually means

Maturity doesn’t mean crypto needs to lean into centralization or abandon self-custody or composability. It just means that coordination, where markets require it, needs to be prioritized: shared liquidity, consistent pricing and capital efficiency. At the same time, decentralization must be preserved where it truly matters.

This is about function over flash when it comes to designing systems. In finance, clever ideas matter far less than dependable ones.

This isn’t a surrender to corporate whim

Putting on a suit doesn’t mean losing crypto’s identity. Crypto so far has focused on proving what’s possible, but it needs to recognize that this next phase is about proving what works.

The future of crypto will not be defined by how radical it sounds; it will be defined by operational consistency when real capital is on the line. That’s not selling out — but growing up.

Opinion by: Neil Staunton, CEO and co-founder of Superset.