The right voices in the right rooms can reshape product, policy and hiring outcomes in crypto, three senior executives said Tuesday at CoinDesk’s Miami Consensus conference. Each cited a moment in their own organization where an outside perspective changed what was being built, debated, or prioritized.
Maja Lapcevic, Mastercard’s senior vice president for blockchain and digital assets, said her company’s crypto team initially saw infrastructure as key to crypto adoption, until a partner reframed the issue around usability. “We probably all thought infrastructure was the winning formula for crypto,” she said. “But one of our partners really helped shed some light on how we make crypto accessible, not complex, very simple to use.” This thinking has helped push Mastercard toward stablecoin-linked cards, including for users in markets with limited access to traditional financial services, she said.
Alison Mangiero, director of strategy at the Crypto Council for Innovation, said her organization had a similar realization about staking after bringing builders to policy discussions. “Sometimes we may think we understand, or we put things in a bucket,” she said. “We’ll take a shortcut and say, oh, this looks like a fund. Oh, this looks like interest or yield, when in reality what’s going on under the hood is fundamentally different.” After hearing from people who were building staking primitives, she said, CCI saw the need to describe staking as a technical service rather than a financialized product.
Clerisy co-founder and managing partner Alexandra Wilkis Wilson made the pitch during the hiring. “A lot of us have a very comfortable bias of hiring people who not only might look like us or remind you of your younger self,” she said. She recalled a 10-person startup where a Myers-Briggs analysis found that eight of 10 team members were extroverted. “It’s very important when you’re developing teams to not only introduce diversity on the outside, but also to think about diversity on the inside,” she said.
Mangiero concluded by presenting the problem as one that concerns the entire industry. Crypto is “going through a moment right now where people are really interested in hearing our voice,” she said, “but it begs the question: What is our voice at the end of the day?” The conference, she added, “is called Consensus for good reason.” Good policy, she said, requires the industry to ensure that different communities are reflected, including token holders and people relying on blockchain networks, while protecting consumers and allowing innovation to thrive.
