Consensus Miami panel: trust and transparency, not just tech, are the real blockers to crypto adoption.

Executives from PayPal, Robinhood, Public.com and 248 Ventures told CoinDesk's Consensus Miami on Tuesday that the bottleneck for mainstream crypto uptake is not technology — it is user trust, built through visible, controllable product design. Public.com CFO Sruthi Lanka described her firm's agentic-investing product as a 'deterministic recipe' users must review and approve before any trade executes. 'Make sure it's not a black box,' she said.

PayPal's Smitha Purohit argued that compliance should be the foundation, not an afterthought: 'When you build too fast, compliance comes as a secondary thought, and I don't think that's the way to build scalable products.' Robinhood VP Nicola White added that 50% of the platform's Q1 new users were first-time investors — a statistic she used to question whether 100x retail perpetuals are a product the industry should be shipping at…