The path to mainstream cryptocurrency adoption is through more visible and controllable product design, executives from PayPal, Robinhood, Public.com and 248 Ventures said Tuesday at the CoinDesk Consensus Conference in Miami.
“It’s important to tell users of AI products what the underlying system is not doing in addition to what the underlying system is doing,” said Sruthi LANKA, chief financial officer at Public.com. Public has built proxy investing products so that users can review and approve a “deterministic recipe” before making any trades. “Make sure it’s not a black box,” she said. The result, according to Ranka, is an organization where everyone writes code: “I have accountants writing code. We have marketers playing code. Everybody is an engineer, and I think this is only going to become more common.”
Smitha Purohit, senior director of crypto products at PayPal, said trust is “a factor of two things”; whether users can start small and experiment, and whether the company will provide support when things go wrong.
“When you build too fast, compliance becomes a secondary consideration, and I don’t think that’s the way to build a scalable product. It should be compliance first, regulation first, and that’s how PayPal looks at everything,” she said.
Nicola White, vice president of crypto agency at Robinhood and general manager of Bitstamp, said that 50% of the company’s new users in the first quarter considered themselves first-time investors, citing this as a reason for delaying the velocity of retail products.
“We’re 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 may not understand,” she said, citing the October 10 cryptocurrency liquidation incident and questioning, “Should retail customers be offering 100x?” “
Lindsey Bell, chief investment strategist at 248 Ventures, believes adopting the technology is 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. I think you’re better off by talking to your customers and prospects and really figuring out what makes their heart beat,” she said, citing earlier remarks by a former Mastercard chief marketing officer that traditional market research is now only “23 percent accurate.”
In the last round of lightning funding, Lanka predicted that users will “increasingly make wealth management redundant”; White predicted that the CLARITY Act will be passed and tokenized RWA will make great strides in the United States; Bell proposed that “by early next year”, 80% of Americans may use at least one artificial intelligence agent; Purohit predicted a “pay-as-you-go” model for content and pointed to stablecoins as a way to enable micropayments.