Better Products, Not Better Pitches: The Case For Embedding Crypto Into Everyday Finance

The question of how to bring crypto into daily life has occupied industry minds for over a decade. But according to Arthur Firstov, CBO at Mercuryo, who spoke at HSC, the answer is less revolutionary than it might seem. “The secret is very simple,” they argued. “You just need to build better products that people like to use, that people already use every day — and crypto will inevitably become part of this product.” The insight reframes the challenge: not to convince users to adopt crypto, but to embed it so naturally into existing experiences that adoption becomes a byproduct of convenience.

In order to get there, the speaker identified three narratives set to define the near term. The first is privacy — enabling a more secure infrastructure for users. The second is programmability — replacing manual operational processes with automated, on-chain logic. The third is composability — the ability for financial products to be integrated, combined, and extended without complexity, something blockchains can bring to finance that traditional rails never could. As the speaker put it: “Blockchains can bring to the financial ecosystem something it never had before.”

But technology alone isn’t enough. “In finance, trust is a product,” the speaker noted. Poor UX — slow access, confusing flows, overwhelming interfaces — erodes that trust directly. “People make mistakes, hesitate to use the product, or leave entirely.” Beyond compliance and infrastructure security, they pointed to a critical missing piece: institutions must themselves become users of digital-asset-native products, from fully on-chain banks to stablecoin cards and broader fintech tools. The real challenge, as they framed it, is building products that connect wallets, payments, and traditional financial rails into a seamless whole.

The Industry Is Catching Up — And The Stakes Are Real

These ideas are landing at a moment when the industry is clearly converging on the same conclusions. Past years marked a turning point for privacy in crypto, transforming it from a niche feature into a core requirement for on-chain finance — with major developments including the Ethereum Foundation establishing a new privacy unit and the launch of a private stablecoin by Paxos and Aleo. On the composability front, early conversations at Paris Blockchain Week 2026 converged on a simple message from institutional buyers: if blockchains want serious capital flows, they must solve privacy and composability simultaneously.

The programmability pillar is equally active. Traditional assets like bonds, equities, and commodities are being recreated as programmable, transparent instruments that settle faster, trade longer hours, and offer richer compliance data — with major institutions from BlackRock to Société Générale already running live programs. Meanwhile, cross-chain bridges, multichain wallets, and interoperability protocols that enable seamless value transfer are becoming increasingly important, with a surge in their sophistication and stability improving both usability and composability.

What ties all three threads together is exactly the UX-first philosophy Arthur Firstov described. Starknet Foundation Executive Director James Strudwick noted that Bitcoin capital has historically remained underutilized due to usability and trust constraints, and that enabling BTC to function as a productive financial asset requires an intentional path toward trust minimization. In other words, the infrastructure conversation and the product conversation are now the same conversation — and the industry is finally catching up to that reality.

The window for half-measures is closing. Privacy, programmability, and composability are no longer aspirational talking points — they are the baseline that serious financial products will need to meet. The institutions and builders who treat these three forces as a unified design brief, rather than separate engineering problems, are the ones most likely to deliver the crypto-native experiences that finally feel inevitable to ordinary users. The technology is ready. The question now is whether the products will be.

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