Sui's Hashi Bridge Tops 1.1 Million Bitcoin Deposits in 3 Weeks

Deposit Volume Climbs in Testnet’s First Weeks

Onchain analysts have reported that activity on Sui’s Hashi testnet has been brisk since the testnet went live on July 22, with cumulative deposits surpassing 1.1 million and withdrawals topping 165,000 in just three weeks.

The pace seems to be indicative of early retail and institutional appetite for bringing native bitcoin onto Sui without wrapping the asset into a synthetic token, a model that has drawn scrutiny on other chains after repeated bridge exploits drained hundreds of millions of dollars from custodial designs in recent years.

Hashi was first introduced by the Sui Foundation in March 2026 as a decentralized primitive built to let bitcoin (BTC) function as collateral in onchain lending and credit markets. The project moved through a private devnet phase before opening the current public testnet, giving developers access to software development kits (SDKs) and integration guides ahead of an eventual mainnet rollout.

Numbers-wise, it bears mentioning that bitcoin-linked decentralized finance (DeFi) has had a rough 2026 with layer-2 BTCFi TVL falling roughly 74% from its 2025 highs to about 91,000 BTC by mid-year. Hashi’s pitch of keeping BTC on its native chain rather than wrapping it is a direct response to that skepticism, and the early deposit and withdrawal counts give Sui a data point to argue the approach is finding an audience despite the broader pullback.

How Hashi Keeps Bitcoin Native

Unlike conventional wrapped-asset bridges, Hashi does not move bitcoin off the Bitcoin network. Instead, users deposit native BTC, Sui validators confirm the transaction, and the protocol mints hBTC, a representative token that can be used as programmable collateral for institutional lending and stablecoin borrowing while the underlying bitcoin stays put on its own chain.

Security rests on a layered design where deposits are secured by a 2-of-2 multisig requiring signatures from the protocol’s multi-party computation (MPC) validators, a cryptographic setup in which no single party ever holds a complete private key.

Lastly, withdrawals pass through a Guardian Layer, a configurable risk-management system that functions as a circuit breaker, reviewing large withdrawal requests against preset thresholds before they clear. In sum, the design structure attempts to avoid the single points of failure that left older cross-chain bridges vulnerable to exploits.

Institutional Backers Line Up Behind the Protocol

More than 25 institutions are currently stress-testing the system, including custody and trading heavyweights Bitgo and Cumberland alongside Swissborg, Fluid and Ledger. Their participation spans trading desks, custody infrastructure and wealth platforms, signaling demand for compliant, non-custodial ways to put idle bitcoin to work in DeFi without taking on the counterparty risk that has dogged earlier wrapped-bitcoin bridges.

The protocol’s revenue model leans on interest-rate spreads between what depositors earn and what borrowers pay for bitcoin-backed loans, rather than relying on inflationary token emissions to bootstrap activity.

That structure mirrors how traditional lending desks price credit, an approach Sui’s backers argue will hold up better once testnet incentives disappear and real capital is on the line.

If Hashi can eventually capture even a small share of the $1.4 trillion bitcoin market for onchain lending, it would represent one of the more significant crossovers between Bitcoin’s balance sheet and a non-Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem so far.