Crypto companies are shifting their focus from building on-chain financial products to getting customers to use them regularly as the industry seeks to move closer to mainstream finance.

  • Asset managers have launched tokenized funds,

  • exchanges are expanding into lending and payments, and

  • blockchain networks are seeking institutional customers.

The challenge is increasingly to demonstrate sustained usage rather than simply prove that the technology works.

 

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For Coinbase, the focus is on making crypto products useful for everyday financial needs rather than emphasizing the technology underneath them, said Ben Shen, the company’s head of financial services and loyalty products.

Customers want to grow, hold, send, spend, or borrow money while the underlying blockchain is often less important to them, Shen said.

Coinbase is seeking what Shen described as “magic moments” that immediately demonstrate a product’s usefulness. The company views adoption as a cycle in which customers

  • bring money onto its platform,

  • have reasons to keep it there, and then

  • find ways to spend, trade, or make payments with those assets.

Rewards and other incentives can help persuade customers to move money onto a platform, Shen said, but the goal is to turn that initial incentive into longer-term use.

 

“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,” he said.

 

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The same challenge applies to blockchain networks seeking institutional customers.

 

Kevin O’Leary, chairman of O’Leary Ventures, said networks need to demonstrate that companies are using their infrastructure rather than merely testing it.

“The challenge you have is ‘show me, show me adoption,'” O’Leary said at the Avalanche Summit in New York in September 2026.

 

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He said institutional customers want to see actual deals and adoption rather than tests of blockchain technology.

For asset manager, WisdomTree, which oversees about $150 billion, expanding distribution is another route to adoption.

 

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The company has built tokenized funds including WTGXX, a tokenized money market fund with about $1.2 billion in assets, according to Will Peck, WisdomTree’s head of digital assets.

WisdomTree is working to make its funds available through platforms beyond its own. A recent collaboration with MoonPay allows eligible U.S. retail customers to access WTGXX through MoonPay and buy the fund using stablecoins without separately onboarding with WisdomTree, Peck said.

Coinbase is also exploring distribution through third-party platforms, including artificial intelligence tools. Shen said AI agents could eventually become another route through which customers access financial services.

As crypto firms increasingly compete with traditional financial companies, the focus is moving beyond whether products can be built to whether customers find enough value in them to keep using them.

 

 

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