Supported by over 20 institutions: How does Sui's new native language Hashi rewrite Bitcoin's financial trust rules?

Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

At a time when market attention is alternately drawn to US stocks, AI, and gold, Sui recently announced a new move:

Based on Sui’s Bitcoin collateral primitive Hashi, which is about to launch, and has garnered support from a number of top institutions.

Bitcoin finance, a long-standing topic that still hasn’t been fully understood:

As the largest on-chain asset vault with a market cap of over 1.4 trillion, currently less than 0.22% of Bitcoin is used in DeFi.

The core reason for the misunderstanding isn’t due to insufficient functionality, but because the trust premise is wrong. In many past attempts, users are often misled—you think your Bitcoin is in your hands, but in reality, it’s on someone else’s ledger. The collapse of projects like Celsius, Voyager, Genesis, etc., repeatedly rings the alarm on the logic of “sacrificing trust for efficiency.”

Especially with synthetic Bitcoin, which, despite attracting a considerable number of retail investors, this structure has failed to convert large amounts of Bitcoin into DeFi capital, and cannot attract institutions and large asset holders who require stronger guarantees.

This is precisely the critical opportunity for Hashi, the primitive launched by Sui:

Rebuilding the most crucial trust foundation of Bitcoin finance.

Allowing native BTC collateralization to be organized more transparently within Sui’s smart contract environment—without wrapping, without synthesis, without handing keys to any centralized entity—and turning this capability directly into reusable interfaces.

Hashi’s native BTC programmability: BTC remains off-chain, collateral rights enter the Sui network

The design philosophy of Hashi can be summarized in one sentence:

Assets are on the Bitcoin network, rights are on the Sui network—both are valid simultaneously and do not interfere with each other.

Suppose you have one Bitcoin and want to use it as collateral to borrow USDC.

In most previous solutions:

You either deposit BTC into a centralized platform to get a borrowing limit, or accept Wrapped BTC. Your Bitcoin, at some point, must be handed over to someone else, essentially exchanging “trust in a certain entity” for “programmability.”

But with Hashi:

Deposit: Users deposit BTC into a dedicated address (a unique Bitcoin deposit address generated for their Sui address by Hashi). The private key of this address doesn’t belong to any individual but is jointly controlled by validators on the Sui network. Only when enough validators reach consensus can the BTC be used. This means no single entity can steal your funds unless they control more than one-third of the entire Sui validator network.

Credential generation: Validators monitor the Bitcoin network simultaneously. When they confirm your BTC has indeed been locked in, they generate a corresponding collateral proof on the Sui chain. This proof isn’t a newly issued token or a wrapped asset; it’s an on-chain proof that a real BTC has been locked, and you are its owner.

As collateral: With this proof, you can borrow money, participate in DeFi, set yield strategies within Sui’s smart contracts. All rules are coded, automatically executed, and no one can manipulate them mid-process.

Repayment and withdrawal: After repayment, validators use MPC threshold signatures to automatically release the native BTC on the Bitcoin mainnet, which can be withdrawn to any Bitcoin address, all without manual intervention.

Guardian Layer: To prevent extreme cases (such as validator collusion), Hashi introduces an additional Guardian Layer as a secondary check and backup protection, mainly monitoring large withdrawals or abnormal thresholds to prevent systemic risks.

Throughout its lifecycle:

BTC always remains on the Bitcoin mainnet, not moved into internal platform accounts;

No single centralized entity controls the private keys;

On Sui, what circulates is a collateral right backed by real BTC, re-opening the native programmability of BTC;

And the objects users need to trust are only the validator network and smart contracts.

In simple terms, Hashi aims to enable the on-chain recognition of native BTC collateral relationships without overly trusting centralized entities.

When the market is stable, users may perceive this difference as subtle, but in extreme situations like platform failures or liquidity crises, it’s the difference between your BTC still being there or not.

It’s not just a product, but a “primitive”: a reusable “standard brick”

From a design perspective, Hashi is a more decentralized, trust-minimized, and transparent Bitcoin financial solution.

But if you only understand Hashi as a single “solution,” you might miss its most promising aspect.

It’s important to note that for a long time, Sui has been working toward evolving from “a single chain” to “a comprehensive developer infrastructure.” Whether it’s launching Walrus, Seal, or Nautilus, all aim to provide native full-stack solutions—from execution, storage, permission control to off-chain computation—to facilitate developers and build a thriving ecosystem.

This time, the focus on Bitcoin finance is no exception.

According to the official definition:

Hashi is the first decentralized Bitcoin collateral primitive developed by Mysten Labs, allowing developers to actively handle Bitcoin network UTXOs within Sui’s native smart contract language.

The key term is “primitive.”

In blockchain and DeFi contexts, primitives often refer to foundational building blocks or underlying infrastructure components—like LEGO bricks:

They are not end-user products directly used by ordinary users but foundational modules for developers to build upon.

Just as TCP/IP isn’t an app but underpins all apps; Hashi isn’t a product but a base upon which lending platforms, yield strategies, and structured products can be built.

In other words, Hashi doesn’t provide a closed financial service but offers a fundamental capability that makes native BTC usable as collateral directly within Sui’s smart contracts.

What this collateral is used for, how it’s used, and under what rules, Hashi leaves to the contracts, developers, and markets.

Before Hashi, developers wanting to build BTC-backed protocols faced significant challenges: either accept the trust risks of centralized custody or implement complex native BTC collateral logic from scratch.

Hashi, as a primitive, turns this challenge into a directly reusable interface.

Now, when building specific products, developers can invoke Hashi’s mechanisms directly, enabling their protocols to inherently support native BTC collateral without re-solving the underlying issues—significantly lowering development barriers and time.

And users—whether institutions or individuals—will, for the first time, be able to earn yields with Bitcoin through products built on Hashi, while still maintaining control over their assets. Initially, lending will be Hashi’s primary use case, allowing BTC to be lent out or used as collateral to borrow stablecoins. In the future, Hashi scenarios will expand to vaults, insurance, structured products, credit derivatives, and RWA (real-world asset) yield strategies.

Bitcoin is the most widely recognized and highly liquid asset globally, but historically, this wealth has been almost invisible in on-chain finance: enormous yet non-programmable; valuable but inaccessible to smart contracts directly.

Therefore, when Hashi turns native BTC collateral capabilities into an interface accessible to any developer, the potential upper-layer applications are far beyond any single product or protocol.

And the correctness of this judgment is already evidenced by the strong institutional support Hashi has garnered.

Institutional support from Day One: Building a complete ecosystem around Hashi

Currently, Hashi is live on Sui Devnet, mainly for developer testing and auditing, not yet in production, but has received clear support commitments from several leading industry institutions.

In custody and infrastructure: including BitGo, Blockdaemon, Cobo, Ledger, and other major players, directly connecting institutional BTC from cold storage into on-chain collateral scenarios.

In trading and liquidity: including FalconX, Bullish, CF Benchmarks, providing reliable price feeds, liquidity outlets, and institutional-grade trading counterparties for Hashi.

In security and compliance: including security audit firm OtterSec, formal verification security company Certora, and cryptography and zero-knowledge proof research teams like Asymptotic, which will conduct audits, formal verification, cryptography, and ZKP research before Hashi’s mainnet launch.

Meanwhile, projects like Suilend, Scallop, NAVI Protocol, Matrixdock, Bluefin have announced integration plans with Hashi, unlocking on-chain financial potential and enabling retail and institutional users to experience BTC collateral lending quickly.

Additionally, the institutional insurance provider Soter Insure announced a partnership with Hashi to bring an embedded institutional-grade insurance mechanism as a risk protection layer.

These institutions represent hundreds of billions of dollars in nominal Bitcoin value and mature compliance infrastructure. Their early commitment to integration during Hashi’s Devnet phase indicates that once Hashi launches officially, a large-scale influx of institutional Bitcoin assets into on-chain scenarios is highly feasible.

Meanwhile, looking at these 20+ institutions together reveals an interesting pattern: they almost cover every aspect needed for a complete Bitcoin financial ecosystem:

From secure custody, on-chain collateral, price discovery, liquidity support, lending protocols, yield strategies, RWA integration, to security audits and user onboarding—an end-to-end chain has already taken shape.

In other words, behind this supporter list, a comprehensive Bitcoin financial ecosystem centered around Hashi primitives is already prepared to go live from day one.

Conclusion

Of course, Hashi is still in the Devnet stage. It hasn’t yet experienced the long-term test of mainnet conditions, real asset scales, or extreme market volatility, and its production-level performance still needs time to validate. The path of Bitcoin finance will never become smooth just because a new primitive appears.

But the support from over 20 top institutions for custody, liquidity, security, and protocol layers from Day One makes the market’s recognition of this path clear enough.

The story of Bitcoin finance has been told for many years, but the real breakthrough has never been about “what can be done,” but about “why to trust.”

Past solutions—whether centralized custody or wrapped assets—essentially asked users to choose: give up control for yield, or keep the keys but be excluded from on-chain finance.

Hashi attempts to rewrite this question itself: to make native BTC’s collateral capability a directly callable primitive, allowing this sleeping trillion-dollar vault to be seen by the smart contract world in a non-custodial, verifiable, composable way for the first time.

Trust reconstruction is often more difficult than stacking functions.

If the ultimate goal of Bitcoin finance is to make Bitcoin truly a native collateral in on-chain finance, then what Hashi is doing might just be laying the first stake for that bridge.