For years, crypto firms have constructed financial products atop blockchains. The challenge now is not construction, but adoption — persuading real users to engage with these offerings.
Novelty has run its course in the industry. Funds now come tokenized, exchanges are building out lending and payments, and blockchain networks are chasing institutional business. The issue is no longer about building these products. It is about what will prompt consumers and institutions to pick them.
Coinbase’s Shift From Tech to Habit
Coinbase’s head of financial services and loyalty products, Ben Shen, says the firm is shifting its strategy away from a tech-first approach. Previously, he explains, the company’s crypto products leaned heavily on technical jargon and left users exposed to the underlying blockchain.
Shen’s argument is that customers are interested in practical outcomes. They want to grow their money, hold it, send it, spend it or borrow against it. Whether a blockchain sits underneath the product isn’t necessarily the point.
Coinbase is searching for “magic moments”: moments when a customer can instantly grasp why a product matters. The thinking behind it is that one powerful encounter can transform a brief trial into a permanent habit.
Rewards, Trust and the Flywheel
Permanent features and temporary promotions alike can serve as rewards. Some rewards come built into the product itself, while others exist only for a limited time, meant to draw funds away from a rival offering. Coinbase counts on these incentives to overcome hesitation and persuade people to give a new option a try.
The company hopes that users will not take their money off the platform after a promotion concludes. Instead, the wager is that when funds arrive, customers will discover additional uses for keeping it on the platform.
The cycle works like this:
- Money comes onto the platform.
- Customers have a reason to hold it there.
- They have ways to use it — spending, trading, lending.
“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 said.
O’Leary’s Demand for Real Adoption
Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank investor and chairman of O’Leary Ventures has made clear what blockchain networks must demonstrate. At the Avalanche Summit in New York last month, he stated that institutional clients demand evidence of real-world adoption, not merely trials.
“The challenge you have is ‘show me, show me adoption,'” O’Leary said. “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.”
One big customer can also make landing the next one easier. “The most powerful marketing tool of technology is word of mouth between competitors,” O’Leary said.
Shen noted that financial services rely greatly on trust, since customers hand over their money, sometimes their paycheck and savings. That makes hearing from someone who has already used a service and found it reliable matter deeply.
“There’s like a social proof thing for financial services that is important,” he said.
WisdomTree Expands Its Tokenized Funds
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 now wants to get those funds onto more platforms.
A partnership with MoonPay was recently announced, and it gives eligible U.S. retail customers access to WTGXX through MoonPay’s platform. Those who have already given their details to MoonPay can purchase the fund using stablecoins without needing to separately sign up with WisdomTree.
Will Peck, WisdomTree’s head of digital assets, described the arrangement as a way to reach customers through a different front end. “You don’t need to just come to WisdomTree,” he said. “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.”
Distribution Outside the Home Platform
Shen has said that even as Coinbase considers ways its products can reach customers beyond its own platform, he does not see that replacing the need for companies to build their own apps and websites.
The majority are likely to keep a first-party platform while also searching for alternative distribution methods, he said, and AI agents might end up being one of those additional paths.
The Order of Efforts
| Step | What Coinbase Does |
|---|---|
| 1 | Get money onto the platform |
| 2 | Give customers a reason to hold it there |
| 3 | Offer ways to use it — spend, trade, lend |
The Problem With Promotions
A one-time reward can convince a person to give a product a single trial. However, once the promotion comes to an end, nothing in the arrangement requires them to stay with it. The whole plan depends upon that distinction holding true.
Coinbase is betting that customers will find reasons to keep their money once it gets there. That is the risk the company is taking on.
What We Make of This
Decades of development have shown the industry’s capacity to construct. The remaining challenge is demonstrating that these creations can actually be put into service.
O’Leary’s demand for real adoption is the sharpest expression of this tension. Institutional clients want to see deals, not tests. They want proof that a network is actually being used.
The consumer edition leaves out some of the detail. What matters most to people is hearing from others who have already used a service and found it dependable. That kind of trust takes time to build up and is difficult to manufacture.
Source material: “Crypto poured years into new products. The next challenge is keeping users,” CoinDesk.
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