The path to mainstream crypto adoption involves designing products that are more visible and controllable, executives from PayPal, Robinhood, Public.com and 248 Ventures said Tuesday at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference.
“It’s important to tell users of AI products what the underlying system doesn’t do in addition to what it does,” said Sruthi Lanka, chief financial officer of Public.com. Public has built its agentic investment product so that users review and approve a “deterministic recipe” before any transaction. “Make sure it’s not a black box,” she said. The result, according to Lanka, is an organization where everyone now writes code: “I have accountants who write code. We have marketers playing with code. Everyone is an engineer, and I think it will only become more common.
Smitha Purohit, senior director of crypto products at PayPal, said trust is “a factor of two things”; if users can start small and experiment, and if the company supports them if something goes wrong.
“When you build too fast, compliance comes second, and I don’t think that’s the best way to build scalable products. You have to put compliance first, regulation first, and that’s how PayPal looks at everything,” she said.
Nicola White, Robinhood’s vice president of crypto institutions and general manager of Bitstamp, said that 50% of the company’s new users in the first quarter identified themselves as new investors, noting that this is why they have curbed the speed of retail products.
“We all build very quickly. I think we need to make sure we slow down and think: Is what we’re building the right thing for the customer? […] I think we’re introducing risks that people maybe don’t understand,” she said, citing the Oct. 10 crypto liquidation event and asking, “Is 100x something a retail customer should be offered?”
Lindsey Bell, chief investment strategist at 248 Ventures, defined adoption as an ultimately emotional decision. “People’s purchases or usage are really driven by emotion; they’re driven by fear. You have to be able to tap into that. And I think you’ll do that best by talking to your customers and your prospects and really understanding what makes their hearts tick,” she said, citing earlier remarks by a former Mastercard marketing director that traditional market research is now only “23 percent” accurate.
In a final whirlwind round, Lanka predicted that users would “increasingly make the wealth manager redundant”; White predicted the passage of the CLARITY Act and symbolized RWAs moving forward in the United States; Bell suggested that “by early next year,” 80 percent of Americans could be operating with at least one AI agent; and Purohit predicted “pay as you go” content models, highlighting stablecoins as a way to enable micropayments.
