Crypto Industry Shifts Focus to Customer Adoption and Engagement

The crypto industry has been shifting its focus from building blockchain-based financial products to getting customers to actually use them and keep coming back. According to Ben Shen, Coinbase's head of financial services and loyalty products, adoption depends on making crypto products useful for everyday financial needs. He emphasizes the importance of 'magic moments' when a customer can immediately see why a product is useful.

Shen explains that getting someone to try a product once is only part of the adoption process. Coinbase thinks about adoption as a cycle: money comes onto the platform, customers have a reason to hold it there, and then they have ways to use it. Rewards are one way to get that cycle started, but Coinbase wants customers to find other things to do with their money once the initial promotion ends.

Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank investor and chairman of O'Leary Ventures, also sees a similar problem playing out among the blockchains themselves. He says that networks looking for institutional business need to show that companies are actually using them. 'The challenge you have is 'show me, show me adoption'', O'Leary said.

WisdomTree, the $150 billion asset manager, has built a suite of tokenized funds, including WTGXX, a tokenized money market fund with about $1.2 billion in assets. The company is expanding distribution of its tokenized funds, making them available on other platforms, such as MoonPay.