Mm.
While Cai has teamed up with Network, letting users deposit Swe native USDC and Swee tokens directly.
This move makes it easier for users to fund accounts directly while bridging the gap between regulated finance and blockchain.
Now Swede Group Holdings in partnership with Athena and the SIE Foundation also launched two new staple coins backed by BlackRock's tokenized Money Market fund.
Athena, the protocol behind USD powers one of the fastest.
Growing USD denominated digital assets with over $14.8 billion in total value lock and widespread integration across D5 platforms as well as centralized exchanges.
Now these launches make Sweet Group the first publicly traded company to create stablepoint infrastructure.
Well joining me here at the New York Stock Exchange is Steven McIntosh, CEO of Sweet Group Holdings, and also co-founder and general partner of the hedge fund Carita.
Great to have you.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you.
Great to be here.
Well, a lot happening when it comes to crypto, but first and foremost, tell me about these stablecoins that are launching and how do you think this will impact the ecosystem?
Yeah, so we at Caritage were already an investor in Athena and have been a big champion of Guy for many years.
And when he proposed in the summer to actually put his hat in the ring for the hyper liquid stablecoin proposal that was ultimately.
Rejected by the community.
I saw a huge opportunity to bring that to SUI, and what we've done essentially is white label the Athena engine.
So we as SUY G will be issuing in partnership with the SUIY Foundation, two native stablecoins, US SUI USDE, which is yield bearing, and obviously USDI, which is genius compliance backed by Biddle.
We see the Athena synthetic dollar growing exponentially.
In DFI uses a collateral base, and we've seen an incredibly powerful ecosystem of DFI users around that stablecoin, and for us it was really important to try and light a match to kick start some real exciting DFI progress in the SUI ecosystem, and I think faced with the choice of a stablecoin that takes yield and fees out of the network. to potentially a rival blockchain like Base with USDC or one that keeps all of the fees and the yield back in the ecosystem like Athena for SUI, it's a clear choice for users and the deal that we struck is really interesting because 10% of the fees go to Athena, but 90% goes back to SUY G and the SUI Foundation to buy back SUI tokens in the market, which is really value accreted for the community.
Yeah, and I do want to ask you, while we're on the topic of partnership, I understand that SUY Network also partnered up with Google to work on agentic payments here.
So tell us about artificial intelligence and the role it plays in this partnership.
So prior to becoming an investor, I actually ran an artificial intelligence business for many years that was started at the University College London AI Research Lab alongside.
We ultimately sold that company to a New York Stock Exchange listed acquire, and I really understand deeply the intersection of both crypto and AI with SUI.
What we have is an object oriented blockchain that's fundamentally different than the account-based models that we see on Ethereum, on Solana, and on Avalanche, a very simple kind of analogy.
About how those differences come to life is imagine it's Black Friday and everyone has to go through the same till.
That's an account-based model.
An object-based model is where essentially every asset, every agent can have its own till, so it scales in parallel sequencing at infinite scale, and you can have really millions, billions, trillions of payments kind of happening concurrently.
I think the kind of to answer your question, the opportunity for the agentic web is exactly what the blockchain was designed for.
We want to be able to pass the trust boundary where agents can act independently, autonomously, but with verifiability.
And with SUI, what the team at Mr Labs built was, yes, a high performance canonical high throughput blockchain, but they also built core pillar.
Of infrastructure around that blockchain they built Walrus, which is decentralized programmable storage.
They built Nautilus, which is verifiable off-chain compute.
They built ZK login for single sign on through your kind of Google credentials to create a wallet and also seal for secrets management and key management.
Now when you put all that together, that's what's required for the agentic payment stack to flourish.
If you want to.
Look for a good analogy, it's probably akin to the SAS stack.
Like if you look at GCP as your AWS, you have this really great proliferation of microservices, architecture, compute, querying, storage.
That's what the SUI team have built, and that's what you need to allow agentic commerce to flourish, and I think we're really on the tipping point of that explosion.
Google.
Chose SUI because SUI really is the universal coordination layer, the programmability layer that will allow agents to act independently and with verifiability where we go essentially from intent to action right now you ask GPT, give me 30% yield across Slana SUY Ethereum.
It'll tell you maybe three ways how to do it, but it won't take those actions for you.
That's where Google and SUI come in.
Yeah, and Stephen, while I have you here, I do want to ask you about Bitcoin in DI.
So for the layperson, can you tell us what that exactly is and the why?
Yeah, so Bitcoin is a $2 trillion asset, right, and ironically it's not really used in Defi.
I think 1 to 2% of Bitcoin is wrapped because people don't want to take bridging risk.
I'm a bitcoiner.
I don't want to bridge my Bitcoin and take the risk that it's hacked in a D5 protocol where a synthetic version of my Bitcoin is used somewhere else.
And so the SUI team announced this really a groundbreaking initiative called Bitcoin Hashi in Singapore.
3 weeks ago and what that means is that the the SUI validator set are now going to run a Bitcoin-like client and essentially a Bitcoin node and what that will allow the the network to do is to use like novel kind of cryptography like NPC technology to have Bitcoin stored locally in a qualified kind of custodian.
And then to mint stablecoins against it on the Bitcoin on the SUI network, and we see that as an explosion of liquidity.
If we can take 1020, 30% of the $2 trillion asset Bitcoin and use that in DFI natively on chain, but without taking that bridging risk, without taking that synthetic risk, it's going to be an explosion of DFI combine that with what we're doing with Athena, I think the stage is set for a really exciting future in Sue's DI ecosystem.
Yeah, and Stephen, you mentioned a keyword there, and that is liquidity, and while I have you here, I do want to ask you about what we have seen in crypto, not just in 2025, but in recent weeks, especially yesterday, because when we look at the price action of the crypto majors, including Bitcoin and ET in the past 20.
4 hours we did see some key levels being broken, and this does come on the heels of the 1010 event we saw last month.
So what do you think is happening?
I think 1010 was an extremely severe liquidation event and I think, you know, if I'm honest, like some of the bodies haven't washed up yet, right?
We're starting to see a bit of that in the past like 24, 48 hours where some of these kind of curators of vaults of D5 volts have been.
Proven to be offside with a lot of these liquidations, and I think you know some people took too much leverage and ultimately you know when we have these leverage shakeouts, it's net positive actually for the ecosystem in the long term.
In the short term though, it's kind of violent price action and it's pain.
I think there's a broader kind of macro kind of sensitivity at the moment, you know, with the government shutdown and still some of the kind of tariff fears that kind of bleeds into crypto.
Um, but ultimately I think that the mega trends on, you know, AI and crypto are like the real value drivers in the digital economy, and I think 2026 is going to be a very interesting follow on from this really landmark year that we've had with the Genius Act, clarity coming, you know, institutions are finally open for crypto.
They've been throttled for many years. the previous regime, the previous administration, and they are getting confident and comfortable with digital assets that's kind of manifested in the DA phenomenon, but also just with the success of new ETFs like the Bitweisan ETFs just gone live in the past week.
I think it's a really exciting time to be in digital assets in Wall Street.
Well, great having you on the show today.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights and your perspectives, Stephen.
Thank you.
Thank you.
