Sui Group (SUIG) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript

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DATE

Thursday, May 7, 2026 at 5 p.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Chief Executive Officer — Marius Barnett
• President — Stephen Mackintosh
• Chairman — Douglas Polinsky
• Chief Financial Officer — Joseph Geraci

TAKEAWAYS

• SUI Treasury Position -- 108.7 million SUI tokens held as of May 4, 2026, with the majority actively staked to generate yield.
• Staking Income Generation -- Staking activity produced roughly 5,200 SUI per day, contributing to approximately $300,000 in cumulative income since July 2025.
• Adjusted Revenue -- $1.4 million reported, a significant increase from $778,000 driven primarily by staking and digital lending interest income stemming from the new SUI blockchain treasury strategy.
• Cash and Equivalents -- $15 million at quarter-end, down from $21.9 million at year-end 2025.
• Operating Expense (Ex-Non-Cash) -- Excluding non-cash losses and stock-based compensation, operating expense was $5.6 million, establishing a higher base cost structure post-strategic shift.
• Non-Cash Digital Asset Losses -- $71 million in total non-cash losses recorded, consisting of both unrealized mark-to-market SUI valuation changes and realized losses from SUI token transfers to Galaxy Digital.
• Net Loss -- $71 million, or $0.88 per diluted share, directly impacted by accounting-driven digital asset revaluation and transfer events.
• Daily SUI Yield Forecast -- Planned end-of-year yield target revised to 3%-4% due to a recent rise in DeFi hacks, with “significant changes in the DeFi ecosystems at the moment.”
• Strategic Deployments -- Active capital deployment into lending and protocol partnerships, including work with Bluefin, Ember Protocol, and SUI–USDE stablecoin infrastructure, “designed to outperform passive staking.”
• Share Count -- 80.9 million shares outstanding including prefunded warrants.
• Operational Income (Excluding Unrealized Losses) -- $1.6 million from staking and specialty finance businesses, clarifying “was separate from the unrealized losses.”

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RISKS

• Stephen Mackintosh stated, “over, I believe, 18 DeFi protocols that have had hacks or been penetrated in the last few weeks,” prompting SUI Group Holdings Limited to remove all SUI from DeFi protocols and adjust yield expectations downward.
• CFO Geraci reported $71 million in non-cash losses “driven primarily by a decline in the price of SUI during the period,” reflecting material digital asset volatility.
• Chairman Polinsky noted “increased credit risk and uncertainty regarding borrower delinquencies” within the specialty finance platform, indicating heightened risk in legacy operations.

SUMMARY

SUI Group Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:SUIG) reported a substantial, accounting-driven net loss primarily due to a steep decline in SUI token price and asset transfer activity, overshadowing marked growth in revenue from its digital asset treasury strategy. Ongoing active deployment of its SUI treasury focuses on ecosystem integration, institutional partnerships, and aiming for SUI-denominated yield above native staking rates, though realized transaction yield guidance was reduced following widespread DeFi platform hacks. The company’s capital allocation has transitioned rapidly away from legacy specialty finance, which now plays a minor support role amid growing concerns about borrower delinquencies and operational credit risk.

• SUI stablecoin transfer volumes exceeded $1 trillion, signaling high network settlement utility supporting the group’s blockchain-centric strategy.
• The SUI blockchain’s technical roadmap highlighted innovations such as “payment intents” and protocols like Hashi and Walrus, targeting agentic AI use cases and scalable, programmable economic coordination.
• Leadership credited enhanced institutional participation and emerging regulatory clarity, such as the Clarity Act’s progress, for supporting digital asset market maturation and SUIG’s ecosystem ambitions.
• Investment focus extends to AI, stablecoins, prediction markets, and real-world tokenization, with active due diligence on new equity and loan opportunities distinct from DeFi platforms recently exposed to cyberattacks.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• Payment Intents: Programmable transaction constructs enabling complex, atomic on-chain payments without user-side execution risk, supporting automated agent workflows on SUI.
• Walrus Protocol: A decentralized data storage platform on SUI providing context retention, programmability, and secure collaboration for agentic software operations.
• Hashi Protocol: Bitcoin-native lending and borrowing protocol leveraging MPC and ZK technologies to collateralize BTC for on-chain credit and stablecoin issuance on SUI.
• Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Autonomous AI-driven systems designed to plan, transact, and coordinate economic activity with minimal human intervention, utilizing blockchain as a settlement and coordination layer.
• Stablecoin Transfer Volume: The aggregate dollar value of stablecoin transactions processed on a blockchain platform, indicating its usage as a medium for digital economic settlement.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Marius Barnett: Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. As many of you know, markets experienced significant dislocation in the fourth quarter of last year. What began as a macro-driven shock, driven in part by unexpected tariff policy developments in October, quickly evolved into a large-scale derivatives unwind. Approximately $19 billion in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated within a very short period of time, driving a sharp repricing across crypto and equity markets. Bitcoin declined materially from its highs, and risk assets more broadly adjusted to tighter liquidity conditions and weaker sentiment—dynamics that carried into the early part of this year. We view this period as a structural reset rather than a breakdown in the system.

Unlike prior cycles, particularly 2022, this volatility was not driven by institutional failures or misconduct. We believe the underlying infrastructure performed as intended. Stablecoin markets, now at a record scale of over $300 billion, remain functional, and institutional participation across ETFs, treasury strategies, and regulated derivatives provided a stabilizing presence that has not existed in previous downturns. We believe the long-term use case for digital assets is resilient. Regulatory clarity is improving, institutional engagement is increasing, and the asset class is entering a more mature phase of development. Periods like this tend to reward disciplined capital allocation, conviction in the asset, and a long-term perspective.

Our decision to anchor SUI Group Holdings Limited's strategy around the SUI blockchain reflects that mindset. We believe SUI represents a meaningful advancement in blockchain architecture. Its object-centric design and the use of the Move programming language enable parallel transaction execution, allowing the network to process transactions simultaneously rather than sequentially. This results in sub-second finality, horizontal scalability, and performance characteristics that are well suited for real-world applications at scale. These capabilities are already being validated by growing activity across decentralized finance, gaming, artificial intelligence, and stablecoin infrastructure. SUI Group Holdings Limited is uniquely positioned within the ecosystem as the only publicly traded company with an official relationship with the SUI Foundation.

That positioning provides differentiated access, credibility, and the ability to deploy capital alongside ecosystem growth. We are not approaching this as passive holders of an asset. We are building an operating platform that participates directly in the expansion of the network. Our objective is to grow SUI per share for our shareholders by actively deploying capital into high-quality opportunities within the ecosystem. This includes supporting leading protocols, providing liquidity, and helping scale infrastructure that generates on-chain economic activity. We have established a scalable framework that aligns our balance sheet with the growth of high-impact protocols and emerging financial infrastructure.

The early initiatives we have taken are intended to demonstrate how this model can be expanded over time with an emphasis on consistency, selectivity, and long-term value creation. Bringing this together, the volatility we have seen in recent months has reinforced several key aspects of our strategy. Institutional infrastructure is proving more resilient. On-chain utility continues to grow through cycles. The latest wave of crypto hacks are short- and medium-term headwinds. Disciplined capital deployment during periods of dislocation can create meaningful long-term value. SUI Group Holdings Limited aims to be at the center of that opportunity.

We hold a treasury of over 108 million SUI tokens and are actively deploying it within the ecosystem to build partnerships with protocols that are creating durable utility on one of the most scalable blockchain platforms in the market today. We are committed to increasing SUI per share in a disciplined, transparent manner with a long-term orientation that reflects the nature of this asset class. With that, I will turn the call over to Stephen to walk through our first quarter operational performance.

Stephen Mackintosh: Thank you, Marius, and good afternoon, everyone. I want to begin with an update on our SUI treasury position. As of 05/04/2026, we hold approximately 108.7 million SUI, including digital asset loans. The majority of this position is actively staked, generating roughly 5,200 SUI per day. Since initiating our treasury strategy in July 2025, staking and lending activity have generated approximately $300,000 in cumulative income. While this base yield is important, we view it as the foundation of our return profile, not the upper bound. Our strategy is focused on deploying capital that can generate returns above the native staking rates.

We partner with institutional-quality teams across the SUI ecosystem, structure transactions that produce incremental yield denominated in SUI, and build a portfolio of protocol-linked economics designed to compound alongside network growth. Our work with Bluefin and Ember Protocol, along with our role in launching the SUI–USDE stablecoin infrastructure, are clear examples of this approach in action. Each initiative is designed to outperform passive staking while expanding our participation in the ecosystem's financial layer. The ecosystem itself continues to evolve in meaningful ways. Total value locked on SUI increased significantly. In February, SUI became the fifth digital asset accessible through a spot exchange-traded product, joining Bitcoin and Ethereum in regulated investment vehicles, as well as recently launched trading on the CME.

In March, the network introduced Hashi, a Bitcoin-native lending and borrowing protocol developed by [inaudible] Labs with participation from leading institutional players. This initiative is designed to bring institutional-grade BTC collateral into on-chain credit markets. These developments reflect a rapidly maturing ecosystem with increasing institutional relevance. I also want to detail why we believe SUI is particularly well positioned for what may be the next major phase of on-chain activity, which is agentic artificial intelligence. By the end of this year, we expect that a significant majority of enterprises will invest in autonomous software systems capable of planning, transacting, and coordinating with limited human inputs.

These systems require a settlement layer with specific characteristics, including sub-second finality, parallel execution, programmable access controls, and reliable stablecoin infrastructure. SUI was designed with these capabilities in mind. We are already seeing practical applications emerge. Autonomous trading systems that operate across decentralized markets require the ability to process concurrent transactions without delay, which is enabled by SUI's parallel execution model. More complex financial workflows, where software agents manage capital allocation and settlement across multiple protocols, require clear state management and predictable execution. SUI's object-centric architecture provides that foundation. In addition, native tools such as SEAL for programmable data access and Walrus for decentralized storage support the memory and coordination requirements of these systems.

Stablecoin transfer volume on SUI passed $1 trillion in the first quarter, which highlights the level of settlement activity that these applications can build upon. We believe SUI Group Holdings Limited is positioned at the intersection of these trends. We hold a scale and productive treasury on a network that is rapidly building out both financial and computational infrastructure. We are deploying that treasury into the protocols driving the most meaningful activity within the ecosystem. And we are doing so with a clear objective of compounding SUI per share over time through disciplined and transparent capital allocation. I will now turn the call over to Douglas Polinsky to provide an update on our specialty finance operations.

Douglas Polinsky: Thank you, Stephen, and thank you all for joining today's call. Our legacy specialty finance platform continues to serve an important role within SUI Group Holdings Limited, even as our strategic focus has shifted toward digital assets. As we have discussed in prior periods, this business was built on a foundation of selective underwriting and structured lending. We continue to focus on opportunities where we have strong visibility into collateral, cash flow, and borrower quality while maintaining a conservative posture on how we deploy capital. At the same time, the relative contribution of this segment to our overall financial profile has evolved.

As our SUI treasury strategy has scaled, digital asset-related activities have become the primary driver of both our balance sheet and our forward-looking strategy. The legacy portfolio remains in place and is now intended as a complementary component rather than the core engine of the business. The specialty finance platform is designed to provide a base level of cash generation while our digital asset strategy offers exposure to higher-growth opportunities within the SUI ecosystem. Though this quarter saw increased credit risk and uncertainty regarding borrower delinquencies, we believe the specialty finance platform can help create a balanced framework as we continue to transition SUI Group Holdings Limited toward a more integrated digital asset platform.

While we are optimistic in specialty finance, our strategic center of gravity is firmly aligned with building a differentiated, institutionally oriented digital asset treasury platform anchored to the SUI blockchain. With that, I would like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Joseph Geraci, to take you through our financial results.

Joseph Geraci: Thank you, Doug. A quick reminder as we review our first quarter financial results: all comparisons and variance commentary refer to the prior-year quarter unless otherwise specified. Due to our strategic shift on 07/31/2025 from our specialty finance business toward blockchain-native treasury management, our historical financial condition and results of operations for the periods presented may not be comparable. Total adjusted revenue, including investment income and other income, for 2026 increased to $1.4 million compared to approximately $778 thousand in 2025. This increase was primarily driven by the generation of staking revenue and digital lending interest income from our SUI digital asset treasury strategy, which had not yet commenced in 2025.

Our first quarter 2026 results include approximately $71 million of non-cash losses on digital assets and receivables. The unrealized loss reflects mark-to-market adjustments driven primarily by a decline in the price of SUI during the period. The realized loss relates to the transfer of SUI tokens to Galaxy Digital, in its capacity as our asset manager, resulting in derecognition of the assets and recognition of the difference between carrying value and fair value at the time of transfer. These U.S. GAAP-required accounting treatments reflect changes in estimated fair value and strategic deployment of digital assets and do not represent an actual cash outflow or impact our liquidity.

As a result, total operating expenses, including net realized and unrealized (loss) on investments in Q1 2026, were $61.1 million compared to approximately $117 thousand in Q1 2025. Excluding the aforementioned unrealized and realized non-cash loss on digital assets and stock-based compensation, operating expense for 2026 was $5.6 million. Net loss for 2026 was $71 million, or $0.88 per diluted share, compared to net income of approximately [inaudible] and $[inaudible] per diluted share in Q1 2025. As of 03/31/2026, cash and cash equivalents were $15 million compared to $21.9 million as of 12/31/2025. This concludes our prepared remarks. We will now open the call for questions. Operator, back to you.

Operator: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. You may press 2 to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners. Please proceed with your question.

Analyst: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. First, a couple of numbers questions, if I could. Could you tell us, at the end of the quarter, what cash was, what the first quarter cash used from operations was, and what the share count was?

Joseph Geraci: Hi, Brian. The share count including prefunded warrants is approximately 80.9 million shares. Total cash, including all stablecoins, was approximately $15 million. Income from operations was approximately $1.6 million. [inaudible regarding tax and adjustments]

Analyst: So when you add back the unrealized losses, it was an income of $1.6 million?

Joseph Geraci: The $1.6 million was separate from the unrealized losses. That was income from staking and from the specialty finance business.

Analyst: Got it. Okay. And then can you discuss any developments either on Google's AP2 or any other exciting development activity that is either already improving transaction volumes on the SUI blockchain or that you expect to?

Stephen Mackintosh: Hi, Brian. I can answer that question. At SUI Live today in Miami, Adeni, the Chief Product Officer of SUI, announced a compelling vision for how SUI is going to be the home of agentic finance. There were a few developments related to your question. First was his keynote introducing payment intents, which is about tackling complex atomic transactions on-chain. This is very different from the crypto UX we have today, where users must choose chains, bridge assets, hold gas, understand swaps, manage slippage, and find various transactions. Payment intents remove this complexity entirely.

The inspiration comes from the team's background at Facebook—WhatsApp made messaging free to everyone around the world, and SUI wants to do the same with payments so payments can be free and highly scalable globally. Payment intents are important for agents because you can scale a machine-readable economic layer that deals with atomic transactions through SUI's novel architecture and programmable transaction blocks, and allows for verifiability using a core infrastructure development that was also released in the past couple of weeks called mWOL, which is related to the Walrus protocol. This is targeted at agentic workflows.

It lives within the Walrus flagship decentralized data storage protocol built on the SUI network and allows for context and reasoning retention, multi-agent collaboration, and, most importantly, verifiable and programmable data such that agents can use storage to scale complex agentic workflows. I also noticed a number of interesting industry partners, including the Google team, present today. Development is continuing, and it is a very exciting time.

Analyst: Last, I know your goal is to increase the yield. Maybe you can provide a pipeline on what kind of deals you are reviewing. Are there dozens? Are there only a couple? And maybe what you hope to exit 2026 with in terms of yield.

Stephen Mackintosh: That is an interesting question. First, just on DeFi at the moment, it is well documented there have been over, I believe, 18 DeFi protocols that have had hacks or been penetrated in the last few weeks. Having spoken deeply with the market and the SUI team, this is across different protocols, with major hacks on platforms like Drift, which are EVM-based protocols. There is a notion that hackers and various actors are learning to use AI to identify potential breaches. We took the precaution to remove all our SUI that were in DeFi ecosystems directly onto DeFi protocols out of an abundance of caution. We do not want any losses in pursuit of yield.

We have always taken a risk-based approach. We did that over the last few weeks as soon as we saw these hacks coming through. We expect to end the year at approximately 3% to 4%. We had planned to end the year slightly higher, but there have been significant changes in the DeFi ecosystems at the moment, and we are constantly monitoring that from a yield perspective. From an investment perspective, we are constantly looking at different investments. The Bluefin loan that we did was very well structured, and we continue to see an excellent deal out of that loan.

We are looking to advance a few other loans on that basis and hope to announce a few things in coming quarters of similar types of transactions. We are also looking at making some equity investments, which will not be material in terms of the greater balance sheet, but we believe they could move the needle. Those relate to the AI sector, which we believe is the greatest unlock for blockchains.

Analyst: Great. Thanks, Stephen. Thanks, Marius.

Stephen Mackintosh: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Devin Ryan with Citizens Bank. Please proceed with your question.

Analyst: Hey, guys, this is Neil Eloff here for Devin. I would love to talk about what you are mentioning on partnerships. Can you give us more insights on how you decide on these partnerships and what goes into that decision-making process? Then beyond the AI target, are there any other specific parts of the chain that you are looking to invest in, whether that be loans or other aspects?

Stephen Mackintosh: Sure. First of all, when we look at partnerships, the fundamental is risk—how much risk we are taking, what the risk of losses are, the right risk-reward profile, and how it fits strategically into the business on a long-term basis. On loans, we are constantly looking, but we have taken a risk-based approach. We still have some loans to institutional clients where we are taking counterparty risk that are not in DeFi ecosystems. Those continue to yield well, and with some of them we have parent guarantees where we lower the rate. It is always a risk-based approach, and we continue to look to expand that part of the business.

From an equity investment perspective, we are looking at things being built in the ecosystem, and there are four main sectors we are focused on: AI, stablecoins, prediction markets, and real-world tokenization. We think those will be key areas that advance and are core fundamentals of the blockchain sector going forward. In terms of how we invest, we are looking for bold initiatives, not just another protocol. In AI, we are not only investing in AI but also in companies that are AI-centric that we can bring to blockchain and that can build on the blockchain—how they integrate with the blockchain—looking into the future and how that can evolve.

We have always thought that, long term, the promise of the sector is that there is not “Web3” and “Web2,” but another technology integrated into the real world together.

Analyst: Thanks. Maybe the second question is related to policy. Obviously, the big movement is the Clarity Act. Can you give us thoughts on how you expect that to be a catalyst for the industry and for SUI particularly?

Marius Barnett: Steve, do you want to add to that?

Stephen Mackintosh: Yes. The industry is anticipating a significant development with Clarity passing the Senate Banking Committee. I believe it is a matter of the industry pulling together and getting it signed while there is an opportunity now, and not having it pushed out into the future. I believe there is substantial institutional participation coming from asset managers and the sell-side investment banks. I experienced that specifically in the form of Bitcoin Hashi. Bitcoin Hashi is an exciting protocol that was introduced this year.

It is basically for institutions and qualified custodians to put their Bitcoin to work by using MPC technology and ZK technology on the SUI blockchain, with SUI validators running Bitcoin light clients and nodes, such that stablecoins can be minted against Bitcoin holdings in qualified custody. The amount of institutional participation I have seen for this protocol, which is trying to tackle the fact that only 1% of Bitcoin is used in DeFi through wrapped Bitcoin—which is not only a security issue but also a taxable event—has been notable. The Bitcoin Hashi introduction was well received by the institutional community and continues to be widely anticipated here at SUI Live in Miami.

It is a testament to the anticipation that many stakeholders in the industry have around clarity. In regard to price appreciation in the token, following the liquidation cascade last year, and with the Bitcoin price peaking in October and many of the four-year cycle believers, there is some expectation that altcoins and Bitcoin can reprice to the upside at some point in 2026. It might take a couple of months to start building momentum. We are cautiously optimistic, and we look at all the data and signals to make interesting investments from the SUI Group Holdings Limited balance sheet.

Analyst: Awesome. Appreciate it, guys. Thanks.

Stephen Mackintosh: Thank you.

Operator: We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session, and this also concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation. Thank you, and have a great day.

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