On October 2, 2025, Cantina participated in Hack Seasons Singapore, a global event series designed to connect technical teams with capital, infrastructure, and community. The panel discussion, titled “What’s Still Holding Back Mainstream Crypto Use?”, brought together leaders from Mastercard, Mercuryo, Babylon, and Cantina to evaluate the barriers to mainstream adoption.
The conversation focused on several key areas: usability, trust, security design, and the evolving role of stablecoins. Representing Cantina, GTM Sharon Ideguchi outlined why security and infrastructure remain central to enabling safe, accessible crypto systems for the broader market.
Watch the full panel discussion:
Key takeaways:
User Experience and Integration Remain Critical
Despite improvements across wallet design, onboarding flows, and network tooling, most users still struggle to integrate crypto into their daily lives. Petr Kozyakov of Mercuryo presented usage data showing that only 12 percent of users report crypto wallets fit their regular financial behavior.
The issue is not awareness. It is the lack of seamless interaction. Crypto platforms often require knowledge of gas mechanics, asset bridging, and token approvals. These requirements introduce friction that disqualifies non-technical users from regular participation.
Christian Rau from Mastercard emphasized that financial products today must align with established behavior patterns. Consumers expect a high baseline for functionality. Crypto applications must meet that baseline to achieve lasting retention.
Security Requirements Are Expanding Beyond Smart Contracts
In her remarks, Sharon Ideguchi addressed a concern that continues to surface among both institutions and end users: confidence in protocol safety. Cantina has observed a recurring pattern where even experienced individuals fall victim to exploits due to blind spots in wallet infrastructure, transaction signing interfaces, or third-party integrations.
Security conversations in crypto have historically centered around smart contract audits. While those remain important, they do not account for attack surfaces such as DNS exposure, compromised APIs, misconfigured multisigs, and inadequate separation of privileged roles.
Ideguchi explained that Cantina’s security philosophy treats safety as a system property, not a feature. Protocol design must enforce guardrails that limit user error and mitigate downstream consequences. This applies across user interactions, not only at the contract level.
Education Models Must Reflect Real-World Behavior
Educating users on how blockchain systems function is not a prerequisite for adoption. The focus must instead shift toward practical heuristics for identifying risk. Users do not need to understand the cryptographic assumptions behind a transaction, but they should be able to recognize when an interface is behaving in an unexpected or unsafe way.
Ideguchi emphasized the importance of pattern recognition. This includes teaching users to identify phishing behaviors, verify smart contract sources, and avoid unintentionally disclosing wallet permissions.
Security-focused education must be built into user interfaces and workflows, rather than delivered through documentation alone. Products that require constant vigilance are not scalable.
Stablecoins Are Driving Practical Usage but Require Higher Standards
The panel identified stablecoins as one of the most effective tools for onboarding users who are new to crypto. Their value stability, familiarity with fiat currency, and payment potential make them a compelling bridge to practical use cases.
Ideguchi explained that because stablecoins aim to serve as foundational infrastructure, they require a broader set of assurances. A successful stablecoin protocol must demonstrate operational reliability, capital resilience, regulatory alignment, and auditability.
To support this, Cantina developed Web3SOC, a framework that evaluates protocols across four critical dimensions: security, financial stability, operational maturity, and regulatory posture. Web3SOC enables protocols to present clear signals of institutional readiness to external stakeholders.
Pathways Toward Greater Adoption
Each panelist offered perspective on the requirements for reaching broader market penetration. Kozyakov identified the need to eliminate friction between crypto and fiat interactions. Rau discussed the role of consistent, transparent regulation in building user and partner trust. Ideguchi pointed to the challenge of embedding safety into systems without removing user control.
Designing for scale requires that protocols evolve beyond developer-facing tooling and focus on usability, predictability, and resilience. Infrastructure alone is not enough. Adoption follows when systems can meet the expectations users already have from other financial products.
Cantina’s Role in Scaling Secure Infrastructure
Hack Seasons Singapore highlighted the ongoing disconnect between technical maturity and adoption readiness. Addressing this gap requires more than feature development. It requires rethinking how crypto systems are designed, reviewed, and deployed.
Cantina continues to support teams building for this next phase of adoption through code and infrastructure reviews, security architecture planning, and operational readiness standards. If your protocol is preparing to scale or move into more regulated environments, contact the Cantina team to learn how we can help.