The path to mainstream crypto adoption is through more visible, verifiable product design, executives from PayPal, Robinhood, Public.com and 248 Ventures told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Tuesday.
“It’s important to tell users with AI products what the underlying system doesn’t do in addition to what it does,” said Public.com CFO Sruthi Lanka. Public has built its agent-investing product so that users review and approve a “deterministic recipe” before placing a trade. “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 writing code. We have marketers playing with code. Everyone is an engineer, and I think it’s only going to become more common.”
Smitha Purohit, PayPal’s senior director of product for crypto, said trust is “a factor of two things;” whether the users can start small and experiment, and whether the company has their back when something goes wrong.
“When you build too fast, compliance comes as a secondary thought, and I don’t think that’s the way to build scalable products. It should be compliance first, regulatory 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 50% of the company’s new first-quarter users self-identified as first-time investors, pointing to that as the reason for pushing back retail product velocity.
“We’re all building so fast. I think we need to make sure we slow down and think: is what we’re building right for the customer? […] I think we’re introducing risks that people might not understand,” she said, citing the Oct. 10 crypto liquidation event and asking, “Is 100x something that a retail customer should be offered?”
Lindsey Bell, Chief Investment Strategist at 248 Ventures, framed adoption as ultimately an emotional decision. “People’s buying or usage is really driven by emotion; it’s driven by fear. You have to be able to tap into that. And I think you do that best by talking to your customers and your prospects and really finding out what makes their heart beat,” she said, citing earlier remarks by a former Mastercard CMO that “only 23% of traditional market research is now accurate.”
In a closing lightning round, Lanka predicted that users will “increasingly make the wealth manager redundant”; White predicted CLARITY Act passage and tokenized RWAs hitting stride in US; Bell said 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.
