The path to widespread cryptocurrency adoption lies through more visible and controllable product design, executives from PayPal, Robinhood, Public.com and 248 Ventures said Tuesday at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference.
“It’s important to tell users with AI products what the underlying system is not doing in addition to what it is doing,” said Sruthi Lanka, chief financial officer at Public.com. Public has created its agent investment product for users to review and approve a “deterministic recipe” before making any trade. “Make sure it’s not a black box,” he said. The result, according to Lanka, is an organization in which everyone now writes code: “I have accountants writing code. We have marketing people playing with code. Everyone is an engineer, and I think that will become more and more common.”
Smitha Purohit, senior product manager for cryptocurrencies at PayPal, said trust is “a factor of two things”; if users can start small and experiment, and if the company supports them when something goes wrong.
“When you build too quickly, compliance becomes an afterthought, and I don’t think that’s the way to build scalable products. It should be compliance first, regulation first, and that’s how PayPal views everything,” he said.
Nicola White, vice president of crypto institutions at Robinhood and CEO of Bitstamp, said 50% of the company’s first-quarter new users identified as first-time investors, which she pointed to as the reason for slowing the pace of retail products.
“We’re all building very fast. 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 maybe people don’t understand,” he said, citing the Oct. 10 cryptocurrency settlement event and asking, “Is 100x something that should be offered to a retail customer?”
Lindsey Bell, chief investment strategist at 248 Ventures, viewed adoption as ultimately an emotional decision. “People’s purchasing or usage is really driven by emotion; it’s driven by fear. You have to be able to tap into that. And I think the best thing is to talk to your customers and prospects and really find out what makes their heart beat,” he said, citing previous comments from a former Mastercard CMO that traditional market research is now only “23% accurate.”
In a final lightning round, Lanka predicted that users will “make the wealth manager increasingly redundant”; White predicted that passage of the CLARITY Act and tokenized RWAs would advance in the US; Bell posited that “by early next year,” 80% of Americans could be operating with at least one AI agent; and Purohit predicted “pay-as-you-go” models for content, pointing to stablecoins as a way to enable micropayments.
