It’s transparency, not tech alone, that drives crypto adoption, panelists tell Consensus Miami
Execs from PayPal, Robinhood, Public.com and 248 Ventures said the way to move retail into crypto and AI is to slow down, show your work, and put users back in control.
What to know:
- Executives from PayPal, Robinhood, Public.com and 248 Ventures said at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference Tuesday that the bottleneck for crypto and AI-product adoption is not technology alone, but user trust earned through visible, controllable design.
- Robinhood VP of Crypto Institutions Nicola White said 50% of Robinhood’s new platform users in Q1 were first-time investors and warned that retail-facing 100x-leverage perpetuals are a risk the industry should be slowing down to address.
- Public.com CFO Sruthi Lanka predicted that retail users will increasingly “make the wealth manager redundant,” and 248 Ventures’ Lindsey Bell projected that 80% of Americans will be operating with at least one AI agent by early 2027.
“It’s important to tell users with AI products what the underlying system is not doing in addition to what it is doing,” Public.com CFO Sruthi Lanka said. Public has built its agentic-investing product so that users review and approve a “deterministic recipe” before any trade is placed. “Make sure it’s not a black box,” she said. The result, according to Lanka, is an organization where everyone is now writing code: “I have accountants writing code. We have marketing people playing with code. Everyone is an engineer, and I think that’s only going to become more commonplace.”
Smitha Purohit, PayPal’s senior director of product for crypto, said trust is “a factor of two things;” whether 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.
