SUI Group Holdings Ltd. Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss SUI Group Holdings financial and operating results for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2025. Joining us today are SUI Group's Chairman of the Board, Marius Barnett; Chief Investment Officer, Stephen Mackintosh; Chief Executive Officer, Douglas Polinsky; and Chief Financial Officer, Joseph Geraci. By now, everyone should have access to the company's fourth quarter 2025 earnings press release, which was issued this afternoon at approximately 4:05 p.m. Eastern Time. The release is available in the Investor Relations section of the company's website at www.suig.io. This call will also be available for webcast replay on the company's website. Following management remarks, we will open up the call for your questions. Please be advised this conference call will contain statements that are considered forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain known and unknown risks and uncertainties as well as assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected in these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are also subject to other risks and uncertainties that are described from time to time in the company's filings with the SEC. Do not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which are being made only as of the date of this call. Except as required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. For important risks and assumptions associated with such forward-looking statements, please refer to the company's SEC filings.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Before diving into the quarter, I'd like to briefly share my perspective on the current market environment. As many of you know, I am the Co-Founder of Karatage, a London-based investment firm focused on digital assets and emerging technologies. Over the past several cycles, I have invested across public and private blockchain infrastructure, DeFi protocols, and AI-linked digital systems. Volatility in digital assets is not new to us. Cyclical repricing, liquidity compression, and sharp mark-to-market movements are inherent features of emerging asset classes. What has remained consistent across cycles is the long-term progression of technology. Infrastructure improves, developer ecosystems deepen, institutional participation increases, and regulatory clarity advances. We believe we are operating in that progression today. The digital asset industry is entering a more mature phase. The regulatory engagement in the United States has shifted from an uncertainty towards structure. Institutional frameworks around custody, derivatives, and market infrastructure continue to formalize. Policymakers are increasingly focused on integrating digital assets into modern capital markets rather than excluding them. Those developments act as tailwinds, not just for the industry broadly, but for institutional-grade public companies like SUI Group. That context makes the strengthening of our Board particularly important. During the fourth quarter, we appointed former CFTC Commissioner and ex- a16z crypto Global Head of Policy, Brian Quintenz, as an Independent Director. Brian is a recognized leader in financial markets, public policy, and digital asset regulation. He currently serves on the Board of Kalshi, an event-based derivatives exchange, regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and has advised a range of leading institutions across the digital assets and financial services ecosystems. His presence reinforces SUI Group's governance discipline and positions us to engage constructively as regulated frameworks evolve. Against that backdrop, SUI Group continues to execute on a strategy that is intentionally long term. Our objective is not simply token accumulation. We aim to develop a public market gateway into one of the most technically differentiated layer 1 ecosystems in the market. During the quarter, we continued to activate our treasury across multiple verticals. Our partnership with Bluefin is a great example of how we're moving beyond passive capital deployment. Bluefin has scaled into the leading decentralized exchange on SUI with over $4 billion in monthly trading volume, $82 billion in cumulative volume, and expanding lending and vault products. Institutional adoption of on-chain derivatives and structured yield products requires performance infrastructure, and SUI's architecture enables that performance. By aligning with Bluefin, we are directly participating in one of the highest growth segments of on-chain finance. In parallel, we advanced stablecoin infrastructure through the launch of suiUSDe and USDi in collaboration with Ethena and the SUI Foundation. Moving from issuance to activation, we ceded $10 million into the Ember-operated suiUSDe Vault, a permissionless, yield-generating vehicle designed to create durable liquidity for the ecosystem. Stablecoins are foundational to capital formation on chain. Participating in the infrastructure layer positions SUI Group to capture value beyond directional exposure. The combination of these initiatives reflects a core principle guiding our strategy: activation compounds value. We are not simply accumulating an idle treasury. We are scaling it, staking it, and strategically deploying it into high-impact ecosystem infrastructure, all within a regulated publicly traded framework built for transparency and institutional participation. Our strategy is anchored in a structural shift we see underway across global markets: the convergence of blockchain infrastructure, institutional capital, and real-world financial use cases. SUI's architecture is engineered for performance at scale, and that matters as decentralized systems move from experimentation to enterprise-grade deployment. SUI Group is building a position accordingly, not as a short-term trading vehicle, but as a long-term duration platform aligned with network growth, ecosystem expansion, and institutional adoption. Our mandate is to translate technological advancement into per share value for public market investors. With that, I'll pass it over to Stephen to walk you through our fourth quarter operational updates.

Thank you, Marius, and good afternoon, everyone. Our capital allocation framework remains disciplined and straightforward: increase SUI per share, activate the balance sheet responsibly, and preserve long-term flexibility. At the protocol level, SUI continues to distinguish itself technically. Its object-centric architecture and Move programming language allow for parallel execution, low latency finality, and composable digital asset logic. That design enables scalable stablecoins, high-frequency on-chain trading, tokenized real-world assets, and AI-integrated applications, all within a single horizontally scalable Layer 1 environment. Performance characteristics matter when institutional capital enters an ecosystem; throughput, deterministic execution, and low transaction costs are prerequisites for derivatives, lending markets, and structured products. That is where we see SUI positioned structurally well. During the quarter, we continued scaling our treasury and staking substantially all of our holdings, generating approximately 1.7% annualized yield in SUI-denominated rewards. Since the inception of our digital asset treasury strategy in July 2025, we have generated approximately 1.13 million SUI in total staking rewards and lending activities in the SUI ecosystem. This income compounds the treasury over time and reinforces our long-duration orientation. Equally important was the execution of our authorized $50 million share repurchase program. In Q4, we repurchased approximately 7.8 million shares of our common stock at an average price of $2.02 per share. These repurchases represented approximately 8.8% of SUI's shares outstanding at the time of the implementation of the repurchases. At the time of execution, our stock was trading at a meaningful discount to its underlying net asset value and SUI per share exposure. Deploying capital into our own equity under those conditions was a high conviction allocation decision. It increased SUI per share, improved per share exposure to staking yield and ecosystem activation strategies, and reflected confidence in the intrinsic value of the platform. Turning to ecosystem activation, our Bluefin partnership provides more than yield enhancement. As Marius mentioned, Bluefin's Perpetual Futures platform has grown from roughly $1 billion in monthly volume to over $4 billion in monthly volume with cumulative trading volume exceeding $80 billion and expanding lending markets. The protocol now integrates spot, perps, lending, and vault infrastructure within a unified trading environment. As derivatives and structured yield strategies expand on SUI, the presence of institutional-grade liquidity venues becomes critical. Our agreement to lend SUI into Bluefin and participate in revenue share aligns us directly with that growth vector. It also provides a return profile differentiated from passive staking. On the stablecoin side, the launch of suiUSDe and USDi marks an important evolution. Ethena's USDe has scaled into one of the fastest-growing dollar-denominated digital assets in history; bringing that infrastructure natively to SUI expands the ecosystem's monetary base. Our $10 million anchor deployment into the Ember-operated Vault was designed to accelerate liquidity formation and institutional participation. Stablecoin velocity underpins DeFi growth. By pairing treasury exposure with infrastructure participation, we create multiple pathways for value generation: total appreciation, staking yield, protocol revenue share, and liquidity provisioning. As we move into the year ahead, our focus remains on: a) scaling SUI per share through disciplined treasury growth; b) continuing to activate our treasury across staking, lending, derivatives and stablecoin infrastructure; c) maintaining opportunistic capital allocation, including share repurchases when appropriate; and d) operating with institutional-grade transparency as the only publicly traded company with an official SUI foundation relationship. The digital asset market will continue to experience volatility. What endures is infrastructure quality, ecosystem adoption, and disciplined capital management. We are positioned at the intersection of all three. I will now turn the call over to Doug Polinsky, SUI Group's Chief Executive Officer, to provide an update on our specialty finance operations.

Thank you, Stephen, and thank you all for joining today's call. For those who may be new to SUI Group, our company was originally built as a specialty finance platform under Mill City Ventures III. We provide short-term, secured, nonbank lending solutions to businesses and individuals seeking flexible capital for real estate, inventory, and other liquidity needs. These loans are typically collateral-backed and structured to generate income through both interest and origination fees. That legacy lending business continues to perform well, and the platform remains profitable and cash generative. Importantly, it provides steady earnings and liquidity that help limit cash burn. It is a disciplined risk-managed operation that continues to add stability to the broader company. While we remain selective and opportunistic in specialty finance, our strategic center of gravity has shifted. Today, our primary focus is building a differentiated institutionally aligned digital asset treasury platform anchored to the SUI blockchain, leveraging the strength of our legacy business to support that long-term evolution. I'd now like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Joseph Geraci, to take you through our financial results.

Thank you, Doug. A quick reminder as we review our fourth quarter financial results, all comparisons and variance commentary refer to the prior year quarter unless otherwise specified. Due to our strategic shift on July 31, 2025, from our specialty finance business toward blockchain-native treasury management, our historical financial condition and results of operations for the period presented may not be comparable. Gross revenue and portfolio income for the fourth quarter 2025 increased 179% to $2.4 million, compared to approximately $869,000 in quarter 4 of 2024. The increase was primarily driven by the generation of staking revenue and digital lending interest income from our SUI digital asset treasury strategy. Our fourth quarter 2025 results include a $196.1 million noncash unrealized and realized loss related to mark-to-market accounting adjustments on our SUI and digital asset loan receivable holdings. Please note, this is a U.S. GAAP required treatment that reflects changes in estimated fair value and does not represent an actual outflow of cash or impact our liquidity. As a result, total operating expenses, excluding net realized and unrealized gain on portfolio investments in quarter 4 2025 were $203 million, compared to approximately $960,000 in quarter 4 2024. Excluding the aforementioned unrealized and realized loss on digital assets and stock-based compensation, operating expenses for the fourth quarter 2025 were $4.8 million. The net loss for the fourth quarter 2025 was $221.8 million or $5.52 per diluted share, compared to net loss of approximately $91,000 or $0.01 per diluted share in quarter 4 2024. The decrease was primarily driven by the aforementioned noncash unrealized loss on our SUI Holdings. As of December 31, 2025, cash and cash equivalents were $21.9 million, compared to $6 million as of December 31, 2024. As of December 31, 2025, SUI Group held 105,086,451 SUI with a net value of $147.4 million, plus a digital asset loan receivable of 2,961,550 SUI with a net value of $3.6 million. This concludes our prepared remarks. We will now open up for questions from those participating in the call. Operator, back to you.

Our first question comes from Devin Ryan with Citizens Bank.

My first question is about agentic AI. There's been a lot of news on that topic recently, so I'd love to get your thoughts on its role in the blockchain ecosystem. Additionally, could you discuss SUI from an infrastructure perspective? We believe that agentic AI could significantly increase trading volume in the coming years. How is SUI positioned to capitalize on that?

Thank you for the question. This is Stephen Mackintosh, CIO. I think in our view, agents will soon likely be responsible for many of the transactions on the Internet. I think that the blockchain industry will play a critical role as we essentially transition from the mobile era to the cloud era and now to the AI era. I think that SUI is best understood as a coordination layer for user intent. Those intents can be manifested in agents taking actions in commerce from the click of one button and essentially executing all of the necessary complex multistep actions as a single indivisible atomic operation that exists on chain. I think we really are at the tipping point of an explosion of agentic commerce. What's really unique about SUI's architecture is that it allows for the coordination at scale of really high throughput transactions, specifically through the use of a very unique technology perimeter that's on the SUI blockchain, called programmable transaction blocks, also known colloquially as PTBs. A core feature of this architecture is that PTBs let developers or AI agents bundle thousands of operations such as transfers, swaps, contract calls, merges, and splits of an asset, for example, into one single transaction. Because SUI is one of the only blockchains in the industry that has an object-centric data model, it allows for parallel execution of these bundles that can happen at an infinite scale, whereas other blockchains are kind of restricted by sequential ordering and capacity limits for block sizes. PTBs allow the SUI blockchain to scale at low latency, high throughput, and also enable atomic transactions. I think that it's going to be a really critical use case for the SUI blockchain as we see commerce running on agentic workflows that are empowered by stablecoins and crypto wallets. In regard to the trading question, SUI recently shipped a big update for DeepBook, which is the central limit order book on SUI, and introduced margin trading. I think that we really are stepping into a new era of agentic yield generation. There's a company called BEAT that was recently launched in the SUI ecosystem, allowing for agentic yields to be realized on chain. I believe there is huge developer activity to build new agentic businesses that will deliver either commerce workflows or yield workflows for users and developers.

And then my next question is kind of on prediction markets. As these contracts begin to evolve into an asset class of their own, what role do you think SUI gets to play in this market?

That's a very topical question. I think prediction markets are probably on track to reach something in the order of $1 trillion in annual volume by 2030. We've seen explosive growth just in 2026 alone with averages around the $15 billion to $20 billion mark in monthly volume, with obviously high spikes of activity around cultural events such as the Super Bowl or elections. I think that right now, we have two dominant players in the form of Kalshi and Polymarket. But the market is still really young and exciting. I believe that the SUI team and the SUI community is really attracting a lot of talented developers who are looking at different types of prediction market consumer propositions that could be regional or focused on emerging markets. Right now, the prediction market space is definitely Western-centric and very much focused on Western politics. I think there is a huge world out there, especially in the Asian communities, that have very culturally and socially relevant topics and ideas, and sports that really do need native prediction markets. I think that we, at SUI Group, are constantly looking for talented teams and developers who want to capture part of that ever-increasing total addressable market. I think that SUI, because of all of the architectural advantages I mentioned before, can also be utilized to deliver elevated customer experiences in prediction markets.

Our next question comes from the line of Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners.

I just wanted to start with you mentioned at the end of the year, you had $21.9 million of cash. Can you just update us on cash today as well as, where have you had 81 million shares of buyback? Is that about roughly what you got?

Yes, correct. That's correct. So we did just over 80 million shares in total. That includes all the buybacks we did, and we're sitting at approximately $21 million. We generate revenue income from the loan book. But then we also generate income from various institutional lends that we've done, including the Bluefin lends. So that we forecast that cash number to continuously increase in the absence of using that cash for any investments or transactions.

Great. Can you share some insights on the progress of the Google AP2 partnership concerning development? Do you think the recent launches of agentic AI with Clawdbot and Moltbot will lead to an increase in the development and adoption on SUI in the near future? I'm trying to get a better understanding of how you see this evolving in terms of timing.

Yes. I think Stephen touched on it in terms of the opportunity set here. We truly believe that payments for all of these bots and agents are meant to be built on blockchain. I think Patrick Collison mentioned in his annual letter about how all of the payments of agents will be done on blockchain. We believe that is the future here and that SUI is perfectly positioned for it. In terms of agentic, the Google AP2 continues to be worked on between the teams of SUI and Google. We believe that there are going to be many more integrations in the long term in this opportunity set.

Okay. Marius, you mentioned the growth of Bluefin. Did that affect the fourth quarter? Are you generating 5% of their revenue starting in November? Also, how much of the 5,000 daily digital coins is related to that deal?

Yes. Currently, on that deal, I think it's a great example of the type of business we're trying to build here, where we actually can disintermediate the VCs in the market. Here, Bluefin was looking to expand and grow the business, and instead of selling equity in the business, we came in and did an institutional lend on a risk-adjusted basis where we get a piece of their fees. Currently, we get paid weekly in SUI. At the moment, that loan is yielding approximately 17% to 18% per annum.

Wow. Great. I guess my last question, and I'll get back in the queue with maybe a few others, is with the decline in cryptocurrency in general. Can you speak to the demand for similar business development efforts? Is it mainly with Bluefin? Are there other opportunities that are looking for similar type deals for Bootstrap SUI?

Definitely. We're actively in the market looking at these transactions. The key for us is risk and how we assess risk on a risk-adjusted basis. We certainly don't want to be waking up in the morning and making an announcement that one of these lends has gone wrong. What we're looking at is how we manage the risk in these lends and ensure that we are getting the right return profile for it. We are looking at multiple different lends in the last quarter, although it hasn't had an impact yet, but will in the long term. We have been doing various other institutional lends to market makers and institutional participants of SUI where we get parent guarantees. Our long-term target here over the next 12 to 18 months is to be yielding close to 10% on SUI.

Our next question comes from the line of Gareth Gacetta with Cantor Fitzgerald.

I was hoping you could double-click on that last question and sort of the yield-generating opportunities you're looking at outside of traditional staking. So kind of getting to that 10% yield as a baseline is a good metric. But I'm wondering if you can talk about how you're thinking about deploying your treasury balance, whether that be a percentage into staking, a percentage into these DeFi opportunities, or a percentage into lending or something else, how you kind of think about deploying the treasury into these different areas of yield-generating opportunities with respect to that risk like you spoke about?

Yes. It's a great question. From a target perspective, risk is the key thing, first and foremost. Every single opportunity that arises, we look at the risk and work with Galaxy, the asset manager. We analyze that risk, whether in the DeFi ecosystem or the general institutional market. Another lend that you would have seen that we are very proud to have launched is the suiUSDe stablecoin together with Ethena. We minted $10 million of that stablecoin. We placed it in a vault on Ember, which Bluefin built, enhancing the Bluefin ecosystem. We are also deploying that into the DeFi ecosystems. On that lend, we're currently yielding close to 10% on that $10 million of stablecoins. For every transaction we undertake, we analyze it on a risk-adjusted basis.

Great. That's very helpful. And then I just wanted to touch on some news outlets reporting that Meta is working with a third party to look into stablecoin-based payments. Given that the team at Mysten was originally a part of the team working on Meta's Libra stablecoin in 2019, could you maybe just provide some color for the people on the call about why that project was ultimately spun out of Meta? And then also why a blockchain like SUI might be the best choice for a large institution like Meta looking to integrate blockchain into their systems?

So Steve, do you want to answer that?

Yes, sure. The founding story of SUI is one of the most interesting footnotes in crypto history thus far. Had the Facebook Libra and Diem projects been allowed to succeed, there’s a counterfactual view of the world in which I do think that business could have been the biggest business in crypto – potentially bigger than Coinbase or Tether – because of the distribution that came with Facebook at the time. When the SUI team was building Libra and Diem, they realized that the existing tooling in the market was not fit for purpose for the scale they needed to operate at. This insight led to the invention of the Move programming language, a purpose-built programming language for blockchain that allows for limitless scalability. It enables parallel transaction processing, not sequential, as you see in account-based models like Ethereum and Solana. Regarding the news, I believe that Meta has been engaging in different RFPs with various blockchain companies. The future of agentic commerce will be based around universal interoperability; agents will take economic actions empowered by stablecoins in an interoperable Internet. I think the scale of commerce could increase tenfold with agentic workflows running, which is why SUI's architecture can handle that complexity. We are likely to see more agentic frameworks, not just from Google’s AP2 but also from Stripe and others.

And we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. This also concludes the conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines at this time. Have a great day.