What was once considered a speculative fringe movement is quickly becoming part of the world’s financial pipeline, executives from Binance, Revolut and Circle (CRCL) said Wednesday at the Consensus Conference in Miami.
“We’re in the age of Prohibition,” said Rachel Conlan, Binance’s chief marketing officer. “Now we’re in the infrastructure phase.”
Cryptocurrencies are evolving from transactions to everyday functional use cases and are “becoming a fabric of everyday society,” Conlan said.
This shift is increasingly evident in consumer finance. Mazen ElJundi, global head of investments at Revolut, said the cryptocurrency narrative has shifted from speculation to “real-life utility and scaling.”
Revolut operates in more than 40 countries and serves more than 75 million customers, and now integrates cryptocurrencies into a wider range of banking services, including remittances and stablecoin usage. “Cryptocurrency is borderless banking,” he said.
Tim Queenan, senior vice president of marketing at Circle, said institutions are increasingly exploring how to move core financial infrastructure onto the chain. “Infrastructure should be boring,” he said. “It’s what you build on top of it that’s interesting.” Quinan noted that stablecoins have become so embedded in the payments space that many users don’t even consider themselves cryptocurrency users anymore.
From the approval of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to major asset managers putting funds on-chain, institutional momentum is strengthening global retail adoption, panelists said.
But challenges remain. Conlan said the industry still needs to reduce friction and make onboarding easier.
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