This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.
2/26/2026
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 in the December 31st, 2025. Joining us today are SUI Group's Chairman of the Board, Marius Barnett, Chief Investment Officer, Stephen McIntosh, and Chief Executive Officer, Douglas Walensky, and Chief Financial Officer, Joseph DeRisi. 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.coeg.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 Caritage, a London-based investment firm focused on digital assets and emerging technologies. Over the past several cycles, I've invested across public and private blockchain infrastructure, DeFi protocols, and AR-linked digital systems. Volatility in digital assets is not new to us. cyclical repricing, liquidity compression, and a sharp mark-to-market movement 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 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 Surrey Group. That context makes the strengthening of our board particularly important. During the fourth quarter, we appointed former CFTC commissioner and ex-A16C crypto global head of policy, Brian Quintes, 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 asset 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, suey 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 continue 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 SUI-USDE and USDR in collaboration with Athena and the SUI Foundation. Moving from issuance to activation, we seeded $10 million into the EMBA-operated SUI-USDE 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 guarding 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. SWE 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 SURI per share, activate the balance sheet responsibly, and preserve long-term flexibility. At the protocol level, SURI continues to distinguish itself technically. Its object-centric architecture and new programming language allow for parallel execution, low latency finality, and composable digital assets 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-one environment. Performance characteristics matter when institutional capital enters an ecosystem. Screw-put, 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 SUIG'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 SUIG per share exposure. Supplying 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. Standing to ecosystem activation, our Bluefin partnership provides more than yield enhancements 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 factor. It also provides a return profile differentiated from passive staking. On the stable coin side, the launch of SUI-USDE and USDI marks an important evolution. Athena's USDE has scaled into one of the fastest-growing dollar-denominated digital assets in history. Bringing mass infrastructure natively to SUI expands the ecosystem's monetary base. Our $10 million Anchor deployment into the Amber-operated vault was designed to accelerate equity formation and institutional participation. Stablecoin Velocity underpins DeFi growth. By pairing treasury exposure with infrastructure participation, we create multiple pathways for value generation. Token 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 Kalinske, SUI Group's Chief Executive Officer, to provide an update on our specialty finance operations.
Doug. 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, non-bank lending solutions to businesses and individuals that 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. 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 Teresi, to take you through our financial results.
Joe? Joseph Teresi 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 31st of 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 four 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 on 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 one penny per diluted share in quarter four 2024. The decrease was primarily driven by the aforementioned non-cash unrealized loss on our SUI holdings. As of December 31st, 2025, cash and cash equivalents were $21.9 million compared to 6 million as of December 31st, 2024. As of December 31st, 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.
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 to remove yourself from the queue. For participation in speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Devin Ryan with Citizens Bank. Please proceed with your question.
Hi, guys. Neil Eloph on here for Devon. My first question is on agentic AI. There's been a lot of news on the topic recently, so I'd love to get your guys' thoughts on its role in the blockchain ecosystem. And then if you could also talk a little bit about, from an infrastructure point of view, we're thinking that agentic AI can really lift trading volume in the coming years. So how is SUI kind of best positioned from that point of view? Thanks.
Hi, thank you for the question. This is Steven McIntosh, CIO. I think in our view, agents will soon likely be responsible for many of the transactions on the internet. And 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 multi-step actions as a single indivisible atomic operation that exists on chain. And I think that 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 primitive that's on the Sui blockchain called programmable transaction blocks, also known colloquially as PTBs. And a core feature of this architecture is that PTBs let developers or AI agents bundle up to thousands of operations such as transfers, slots, contract calls, merges, splits of an asset, for example, into one single transaction. And 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, you know, really kind of at infinite scale, whereas other blockchains are kind of, you know, restricted by sequential ordering and capacity limits for block sizes. PTBs allow, you know, the SUI blockchain to scale at really kind of low latency, high throughput. And also atomic transactions. So I think that it's going to be a really critical use case for the silly blockchain as we see commerce running on agentic workflows that are really empowered by stable coins and crypto wallets. In regard to the kind of the trading question, SUI recently shipped a big update for DeepBook, which is the central limit order book on SUI and introduced margin trading. And I think that we really are, you know, kind of walking into a new era of agentic yield generation. There's a company called Beef, which was recently launched in the SUI ecosystem. that is allowing for agentic yields to be realized on chain. And I believe there is a huge groundswell of developer activity to build new agentic businesses that will deliver either commerce workflows or yield workflows for users and developers.
Thanks. And then my next question is kind of on prediction markets. As these contracts kind of begin to evolve into an asset class of their own, what role do you guys think SUI gets to play in this market?
Thanks. That's a very topical question. I think predictions markets are probably on track to reach something in the order of a trillion dollars in annual volume by 2030. We've seen explosive growth just in 2026 alone with, I think, averages around the 15 to 20 billion mark in volume per month, 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 Cal Street and Polymarket, but the market is still really young and really exciting. And 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 predictions, markets, consumer propositions that could be regional. For example, it could be focused on emerging markets. Right now, the predictions market space is definitely Western-centric and very much focused on Western politics. And I think that, you know, there's a huge world out there, especially in kind of, you know, the kind of the Asian communities that have very culturally and socially relevant kind of topics and ideas and sports that really do need kind of, you know, native predictions markets. And I think we at Surrey Group are constantly looking for talented teams and developers who want to capture part of that ever-increasing time. And I think that, you Because of all of the architecture advantages that I mentioned before in the answer to the agentic commerce question, they can also be utilized to deliver elevated customer experiences in predictions markets.
Very interesting stuff. Thank you guys for taking the questions.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Kinslinger with Elias Global Partners. Please proceed with your question.
Great. Thanks so much. 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, do I have you at $81 million shares as buyback? Is that about roughly what you got?
Hey, Brian Marius, born and care. Yes, correct. That's correct. So we just over 80 million shares in total. That includes all the barbacks we did. And we're sitting at approximately 21 million. We generate revenue income from the loan book. Um, but then we also generate income from, uh, various institutional lends that we've done, including the Blufen lend. So that, that we forecast that cash number to continuously, uh, increase, uh, in the absence of doing any, uh, using that cash for any investments or transactions.
Great. And maybe can you provide some color on the progress for the Google AP2 partnership related to development? And do you believe. the new agentic AI launches with Clawbot and Motebot. Do you think we'll see an uptick in development and adoption on SWE fairly soon? Just trying to understand how you see that playing out in timing.
Yeah, I think Steve touched on it now just in terms of the the opportunity sets here. We truly believe that payments for all of these bots and agents is meant to be built on blockchain. I think Patrick Collinson mentioned in his annual letter about how all of the payments of agents will be done on blockchain. And we believe that that is the future here and that Sui is perfectly positioned for it. In terms of GenTech, the Google IPR2, that continues to be worked on between the teams, between Sui and Google. And we believe that there's going to be many more integrations in the longer term in this opportunity set.
Okay. And then, Mariusz, you touched on the growth of Bluefin. Did that have an impact on the fourth quarter? Are you generating 5% of their revenue starting in November? And I guess what part of that 5,000 daily digital coins is related to that deal?
Yeah, so we currently on that deal, I think it's a great, great example of the type of business we're trying to build here where we actually also can disintermediate the VCs in the market here where Bluefin were looking to expand and grow their business and instead of selling equity in their business, we came in and did an institutional lend on a risk-adjusted basis where we get a piece of their fees. At current debt, that we get paid weekly in series. And currently 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 demand for similar such business development efforts? Is it, Mainly with Bluefin, are there other opportunities and other entities that are looking for similar type deals for Bootstrap Suite?
Definitely. Definitely. I mean, we're actively in the market looking at these transactions. I think the key for us is risk and how we look at risk and risk on a risk-adjusted basis. You know, we certainly don't want to be waking up in the morning and making an announcement that you know one of these lens has gone wrong so what we're looking at is how we manage the risk in these lens and make sure they'll be getting the right return profile for it i think we're looking at multiple different lens in this last quarter although it hasn't had an impact yet but will in the long term is that we've been doing various other institutional lens to market makers and institutional participants of SUI where we get parent guarantees. And, you know, our long-term target here over the next 12 to 18 months is to be yielding close to 10% on SUI.
Great. That's helpful. Thanks so much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of with Tanner Fitzgerald. Please proceed with your question.
Hi, guys. I was hoping you could kind of 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 kind of 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.
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think from a target perspective, as I said, risk is the key thing first and foremost. So every single opportunity that comes along, we look at the risk and then we work with Galaxy, the asset manager of 3G, to analyze that risk, whether it's in the DeFi ecosystem or in the general institutional markets. Another lend that you would have seen that we did is we were very proud to launch the SUI USD stablecoin together with Athena. We minted $10 million of that stablecoin. We put it in a vault. on EMBA, which is built by Bluefin. So that enhances the Bluefin ecosystem. But then we also are putting that into the DeFi ecosystems. And on that lend, currently we yield in close to 10% on that $10 million of stablecoins that we have minted. So every single transaction we do, we're looking at a balance of institutional lending and DeFi ecosystem lending. I think the key here is that we get all the right mechanisms in place to monitor these pools and ensure that the risk of it is low versus and make sure that we get that right return in the right ordination. I don't think that right now to be going and doing anything wild in the DeFi ecosystems makes sense from a risk-adjusted basis and we don't see ourselves that in that way. So that's why we've done institutional lens to market makers or institutions where, you know, one of the lens we did was $5 million at a seven and a half percent interest rate. But we've got a parent guarantee and we let them go into the DeFi ecosystems and take more risk. So every single transaction we do, we're looking at it on a risk adjusted basis.
Great. That's very helpful. Thank you. And then I just wanted to touch on some news outlets have been reporting that Meta is working with a third party to look into stablecoin-based payments. So given that the team at Mistin was originally a part of the team working on Meta's Libra stablecoin in 2019, Can 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?
Sure. Steve, do you want to answer that?
Yeah, sure. So I think, you know, the founding story of SUI is one of the most, you know, interesting kind of footnotes in crypto's history so far, right? the Facebook Libra and DM projects being allowed to succeed. And the reason they weren't is because of a previously unfavorable administration and regulatory environment. You know, that's the reason why that didn't happen. Had they allowed to succeed in a counterfactual view of the world, I do think that that business, Libra and Deere and the Sablecoin initiative, could have been the biggest businesses in crypto. They could have been bigger than Coinbase. They could have been bigger than... than Teva potentially because of the distribution that came with Facebook at the time. At the time, the Sui team were building Libra and Diem. It was designed for a network of 3 billion users. And when the research team, which was headed by Evan Chang, the CEO of Sui, they looked at the kind of state of the tooling in the market and they realized that it was not fit for purpose for the scale they needed to operate at. So what that caused them to do was to actually evaluate all of the programming languages, the kind of implementation of Solana's Rust library, the use of the Ethereum, staff in the EVM to look at, you know, different kind of languages that have been used in different kind of development cultures, such as C++, et cetera. And they found it was not right for moving money on the internet. That's what allowed the CTO of Mistin and Sui, Sam Blackshear, to actually invent the Move programming language, which is a purpose-built programming language for blockchain that is designed in an object-centric way architecture, which allows for really limitless scalability. It allows for parallel transaction processing, not sequential, that you see in an account-based model, which is on Ethereum and Solana, but to have this kind of limitless low latency, high throughput scale. In regard to, you know, the news, yeah, I believe that, you know, Meta has been engaging in different RFPs with different blockchain companies. It's unclear yet, you know, who will be part of that. But what I would say is that, you know, the future of agentic commerce is going to be one that is based around universal interoperability. These agents will be taking economic actions empowered by stablecoins in an interoperable internet. And I think that the scale of commerce could really increase tenfold when you have agentic workflows running. And I think because of that complexity of transaction states, that really kind of order of magnitude increase in the amount of transactions and microtransactions taking place on the internet, it's only an architecture like SUI that can handle that. And I think, you know, we're going to be seeing more agentic frameworks being penciled, not just by Google's AP2. I think Stripe had just announced an agentic framework. We've got X402, and I think many more will come. And so what I would say is that it's going to be about interoperability, and it's going to be about low latency and scalability. And that's what puts SUI at the heart, I think, of this agentic commerce revolution.
Awesome. That's really exciting. Thank you, guys.
Thank you. And we have reached the end of the question and answer session. And this also, we have reached the end of the conference call as well. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines at this time. Have a great day.
