If you have to pay rent in U.S. dollars next
month, then you need to hold some U.S. dollars.
You can’t just put that at risk in highly volatile
assets. But the money that you can set aside for
two years, five years, you can move that money
into highly volatile assets.
Q: Is that volatility the biggest barrier keeping
people out of cryptos today?
Zhao: Today, in the crypto space, there are a
lot of active traders. There’s a large number of
people who are in this industry for investment
gains or speculative trading, and those guys
actually prefer volatility.
I actually think the biggest factor blocking
or hindering the growth of crypto is ease
of use. Today it’s quite difficult to hold your
cryptocurrency in a secure way, meaning that
if your computer breaks or if your computer
gets a virus, your crypto is still safe. If you lose
your computer, or if you lose your crypto wallet
device, you can still get it back. And that means
you have to have backups and the backup needs
to be secured. They cannot be stolen. And the
last part that many people don’t think about is:
What happens if you go away? People die. If you
suddenly become unavailable, can your kids
get it? How do they get it? Are there ways to
guarantee they will get it and that they’ll get it
only after you die?
There aren’t very good tools to handle all of
those aspects. Centralized exchanges offer one
solution: We hold custody of people’s coins.
(But) how to securely hold your tokens is a
fundamental limitation factor. We have not
provided easy-enough-to-use tools that are also