Do Users Trust Crypto, Or Just Understand It Better Now? OKX Answers

Erald has operated inside nearly every major phase of the industry, from early exchange growth to institutional-grade compliance. His perspective is not maximalist. He doesn’t argue that crypto has replaced banks, or that regulation is the enemy. Instead, he outlines where crypto already outperforms legacy finance, where it clearly does not, and where trust still has to be earned over time.

The conversation centers on stablecoins, payments, custody, and regulation — the unglamorous layers where real adoption is decided.

What This Episode Was About

This episode examines how trust is formed in financial systems when multiple actors — users, exchanges, banks, and regulators — are forced to interact.

Rather than debating whether crypto is “good” or “bad,” the discussion looks at:

• How institutions decide when to re-enter
• How users signal confidence before it shows up publicly
• And how exchanges balance open markets with consumer protection

Below is how the conversation unfolds.

Episode Breakdown

Motivation, Values, and Long-Term Thinking

The episode opens by stripping away status and incentives. If money and career didn’t matter, Erald wouldn’t be trading markets. He’d be running a regenerative farm. The answer matters because it frames his view of crypto as a long-term system, not a short-term extraction mechanism.

That mindset carries into his view on adoption. What still surprises him isn’t crypto behavior — it’s how many people remain locked into slow, expensive banking rails despite better alternatives existing. For him, this highlights how early crypto adoption still is, and how much of the trust is habit rather than rational comparison.

From Trust to Understanding — How Institutions Engage

As banks start taking crypto seriously again, Erald argues the challenge isn’t convincing them crypto is revolutionary — it’s explaining it in familiar terms.

He frames stablecoins as fiat upgraded, not replaced: assets still backed one-to-one, but moved on infrastructure that is always on, globally accessible, and transparent by default. This framing matters for regulators and banks because it lowers perceived novelty and risk.

The discussion then turns to what traditional banks still do better. Not technology but policy influence. Banks shape regulation; crypto firms historically reacted to it. MiCA changes this by giving regulated crypto companies legitimacy and a voice, but Erald warns that this opportunity can be lost if Europe rushes into MiCA 2.0, especially around DeFi, before definitions and consequences are clear.

User Behavior & Intent — What Stablecoin Demand Really Signals

When users buy USDC or another stablecoin, Erald explains, they are rarely making a macroeconomic statement. Instead, they are optimizing for utility.

Two dominant behaviors stand out:

• Using stablecoins as a neutral buffer between trades, and
• Using them for payments, remittances, and peer-to-peer transfers

With the launch of OKX Pay and the OKX Card, stablecoins increasingly function as spendable money, while volatile crypto remains an asset users prefer to hold. This distinction is crucial: users don’t want to spend upside.

The section also addresses why dollar stablecoins dominate Europe despite MiCA. Erald attributes this not to ideology, but to liquidity depth, network effects, and first-mover advantage, and explains why euro stablecoins still struggle to reach the same utility threshold.

Designing for Beginners, Advanced Users, and Institutions

Serving different user types requires more than interface changes; it requires different trust models.

Erald outlines how OKX segments users into:

• Beginners, who value safety and simplicity
• Advanced retail users, who demand control and liquidity
• And institutions that prioritize custody, pricing, and reliability

Rather than forcing all users into one experience, OKX separates modes, limits exposure for beginners, and offers full market access only where users demonstrate readiness. Institutions, meanwhile, receive dedicated support, APIs, and custody structures aligned with traditional finance expectations.

The underlying principle: simplification should not mean deception, and access should scale with competence.

Risk, Protection & Ethical Decision-Making

Exchanges operate closest to moments of failure — issuer pauses, regulatory actions, or sudden confidence loss.

Erald explains that decisions like halting withdrawals or trading are never binary. They depend on transparency from issuers, regulatory guidance, and the potential impact on users. The priority, especially for retail users, is minimizing harm, even if that means limiting open-market purity in edge cases.

On MiCA-driven delistings such as USDT, the user response revealed something important: users care less about brand loyalty and more about stability and continuity. As long as their “digital dollar” behaves like a dollar, trust remains intact.

Innovation Without Overpromising

Post-Terra, algorithmic stablecoins lost credibility, but Erald stops short of declaring the category dead.

He acknowledges that backed stablecoins feel safer today, but leaves room for future innovation if mechanisms are transparent and risks are well understood. The broader lesson: innovation without clarity destroys trust faster than conservatism ever could.

We also address a practical friction users feel immediately: the lack of a deeply liquid euro stablecoin. Until that gap closes, crypto payments in Europe will continue to involve conversion — exactly where users notice friction most.

Institutions, Custody & Rebuilding Trust at Scale

The episode closes on custody and institutional trust.

Through its partnership with Standard Chartered, OKX allows institutions to trade while keeping assets with a globally systemically important bank. Does this signal permanent distrust of exchanges?

Erald’s answer is pragmatic: trust in crypto is cumulative. Proof-of-reserves, transparency, regulation, and time are the only path forward. Crypto exchanges are still in the process of earning what banks accumulated over decades, and shortcuts don’t exist.

Why You Should Watch This Episode

This conversation captures crypto at a structural turning point. Adoption is no longer driven by narratives, but by:

• Payment flows
• Regulatory clarity
• And risk management decisions users may never see, but feel

It’s an episode about crypto growing up, and what that actually requires.

About Money Rewired

Money Rewired explores how money is being rebuilt at the infrastructure level. We focus on systems, incentives, and trade-offs.

Each episode challenges a default assumption about finance and replaces it with how things really work.