The cryptocurrency sector has spent multiple years building out infrastructure for financial products and layering novel creations onto those foundational rails. Now arrives the more difficult task: convincing people to actually make use of these offerings.
This inquiry grows increasingly urgent across the ecosystem as digital assets integrate further with traditional finance. Asset managers have launched tokenized funds, trading platforms are branching into lending, payments, and alternative financial services, while blockchain networks actively court institutional clients. The primary obstacle is no longer demonstrating that these items can be engineered, but rather determining what will motivate consumers and institutions to choose them.
For organizations like Coinbase (COIN), this shift entails focusing less on the underlying technology and more on what customers wish to accomplish with their capital.
“The crypto industry oftentimes in the past was very technology oriented,” noted Ben Shen, Coinbase’s head of financial services and loyalty products. Solutions could feature heavy jargon or expose users directly to the mechanics operating underneath.
That factor diminishes in importance as crypto begins intersecting with conventional financial services, he explained. Users desire to grow their funds, store them, transfer them, disburse them, or borrow against them. Whether a blockchain powers the infrastructure behind the tool is not necessarily the main concern.
Instead, Coinbase searches for what Shen designates as “magic moments” — specific instances where a user instantly perceives the utility of a product. Yet persuading someone to test a tool once constitutes only a fraction of the objective.
Coinbase views user acquisition as a cyclical process: capital enters the platform, users maintain a purpose for keeping funds stored there, and subsequent mechanisms allow them to utilize those assets, he stated. This progression might involve receiving a direct deposit or funding an account, earning yields while holding balances, and ultimately spending, trading, or executing payments with those digital holdings.
“If you create the right magic moments across these three parts of the flywheel, then that’ll get people to increasingly bring more and more money onto the platform,” Shen remarked.
Incentives serve as one method to kickstart that cycle. Certain rewards are integrated directly into the tool, whereas other promotions remain temporary, engineered specifically to entice individuals to transfer capital away from alternative services they currently employ. Such tactics can help “break inertia,” according to Shen.
Nonetheless, Coinbase aims to prevent scenarios where a user migrates funds solely for a bonus and withdraws them immediately after the promotion concludes. The underlying strategy relies on the expectation that once capital resides on the platform, clients will discover additional functions for it.
An individual might initially register due to a yield incentive, for instance, and subsequently utilize those identical funds for trading or purchasing goods, he added.
“Show me adoption”
Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank investor and chairman of O’Leary Ventures, identifies a comparable dilemma unfolding among the underlying blockchains themselves.
During an address at the Avalanche Summit held in New York last month, O’Leary asserted that networks pursuing institutional business must demonstrate tangible utilization by operating companies.
“The challenge you have is ‘show me, show me adoption,’” O’Leary stated.
“The merits of that chain are well understood for those technologists and S&P 500 companies that understand why that’s important in building capacity and not being concerned about transaction volume,” he observed. “I get it, but what I want to see, and everybody else, and which is why they call it work, is you got to get some deals, and you got to get adoption, not just tests.”
Securing one major client can simultaneously simplify the acquisition of subsequent partners. “The most powerful marketing tool of technology is word of mouth between competitors,” O’Leary noted.
A parallel consumer dynamic exists within this space as well. Financial services rely heavily on foundational trust, Shen emphasized. Individuals entrust platforms with their wealth, occasionally their paychecks and lifelong savings. Learning that a peer utilized a particular service and deemed it dependable carries substantial weight.
“There’s like a social proof thing for financial services that is important,” he stated.
Taking the product to the customer
For select enterprises, achieving widespread usage also entails embedding their offerings directly into environments where clients already operate.
WisdomTree, a $150 billion asset manager, has developed an array of tokenized funds, which includes WTGXX, a tokenized money market fund holding roughly $1.2 billion in assets, according to Will Peck, WisdomTree’s head of digital assets.
The firm now seeks to distribute those funds across a broader range of platforms.
“You don’t need to just come to WisdomTree,” Peck explained during an interview. “There’s going to be other access points that you can go through, where you’re effectively coming to WisdomTree, but through a different front end.”
WisdomTree recently unveiled a partnership with MoonPay enabling qualified retail investors in the United States to access WTGXX via MoonPay’s interface. Consumers who have previously completed verification procedures with MoonPay can purchase the fund utilizing stablecoins without undergoing a separate onboarding process with WisdomTree, Peck noted. MoonPay is not intended to serve as the exclusive venue where WisdomTree’s tokenized funds appear.
Coinbase is likewise evaluating methods to deliver its offerings to users outside its native environment.
Shen indicated that he does not view this trend as eliminating the necessity for firms to construct proprietary applications and web portals. Most entities will likely pursue both paths: sustaining a primary proprietary platform while simultaneously exploring alternative distribution channels.
Autonomous artificial intelligence agents could emerge as another viable pathway, he suggested. Coinbase is currently investigating mechanisms allowing its services to integrate with third-party AI frameworks while concurrently developing features on its own ecosystem. The underlying technology and applications remain incomplete. Yet increasingly, engineering capability alone is no longer sufficient.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/10/04/crypto-poured-years-into-new-products-the-next-challenge-is-keeping-users.
