Sui’s Hashi Testnet Goes Live, Targeting a Slice of Bitcoin’s $1.4 Trillion Market

A Bridge Built to Avoid Bridges

The Sui Foundation and Mysten Labs confirmed Hashi’s testnet went live on July 22, the latest step in a project designed to let bitcoin function as collateral in onchain lending and credit markets without wrapping it into a synthetic token or bridging it to another chain (the two approaches that have repeatedly caused losses across DeFi).

Sui first announced Hashi at the devnet stage back in March, positioning the protocol as a way to unlock capital efficiency across bitcoin’s roughly $1.4 trillion market.

“Bitcoin is no different” from other major assets when it comes to building credit markets around it, Mysten Labs Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Adeniyi Abiodun said, adding that Hashi provides “the infrastructure to build those markets onchain with the security, transparency, and programmability institutions have been waiting for.”

How Hashi Actually Works

Hashi keeps bitcoin on the Bitcoin network itself rather than moving or re-minting it elsewhere. Deposits are secured through a 2-of-2 multisig arrangement requiring signatures from both Hashi’s multi-party computation (MPC) validators and a separate Guardian Layer, a configurable risk-management system designed to slow or block suspicious withdrawals before collateral can leave the system.

Loan terms and collateral positions are then tracked onchain, giving lenders full visibility instead of relying on an intermediary’s word for how much bitcoin actually backs a given loan.

The structure also carries a tax advantage over rival designs. Deposits and redemptions are structured, according to legal analysis cited by Sui, to avoid triggering taxable events under U.S. tax law, a meaningful detail for institutions weighing whether to put bitcoin to work rather than let it sit idle.

Why the Wrapped-BTC Risk Is Real

The risk Hashi is built to sidestep isn’t hypothetical, and Sui’s own ecosystem has already lived through it. Volo Protocol, a liquid staking and bitcoin-finance platform also built on Sui, lost $3.5 million in an April 2026 exploit after an attacker compromised a vault admin’s private key, draining roughly $2.1 million in wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) from three vaults. That’s the exact failure mode (i.e. a single custodial key controlling wrapped collateral) that Hashi’s multisig-plus-Guardian-Layer design is meant to make far harder to pull off.

Sui has taken other paths to bitcoin liquidity too. Threshold’s tBTC went live on Sui as a decentralized, non-custodial wrapped bitcoin alternative, and the Sui Bridge separately launched on mainnet to move assets like ether between Ethereum and Sui. Hashi is a different bet where rather than wrapping or bridging bitcoin at all, it leaves the asset on Bitcoin’s own chain and settles everything else around it.

Who’s Already Testing It

More than 25 institutional partners are already stress-testing lending and credit applications on the testnet, including custody giant Bitgo, trading firms Cumberland and FalconX, hardware wallet maker Ledger, infrastructure provider Blockdaemon, exchange Bullish, and Sui-native lending platforms Navi and Scallop.

Wave Digital Assets has also committed to a three-year plan prioritizing bitcoin-yield-bearing bond tokenization on Sui once Hashi reaches mainnet, one of the clearest signs yet that traditional finance players see the protocol as more than a DeFi experiment.

That said, Hashi has no announced mainnet date yet, and the testnet phase exists specifically so builders and institutions can integrate lending, borrowing, and credit products before real money is at stake. If the pilot holds up, Hashi would give bitcoin holders a way to earn yield on native BTC without the custodial single-point-of-failure risk that hit Volo Protocol just three months ago.