Crypto has spent a few years asking customers to just accept complexity in change for possession. However as self-custody strikes nearer and nearer to the mainstream viewers, Belief Pockets’s new CEO, Felix Fan, argues that the actual problem is now not proving why individuals ought to management their belongings – it’s making that management really feel easy.
Within the following interview, we talk about the product classes shaping Fan’s management, why wallets should take extra duty for consumer safety, how funds, buying and selling, stablecoins, AI brokers, and clear regulation are pushing crypto right into a extra mature part.
His message, nevertheless, is evident: self-custody might have gained the philosophical argument, however the consumer expertise has some catching as much as do.
You’ve stepped into a brand new function at Belief Pockets at a second when self-custody is changing into each extra mainstream and extra advanced. What elements of your personal journey ready you most for main a product utilized by tons of of hundreds of thousands of individuals?
My experience lies in product, complemented by my expertise as a serial entrepreneur. Earlier than Belief Pockets, I spent years enthusiastic about methods to make advanced monetary instruments really feel easy to individuals who don’t have time or persistence to develop into specialists.
Main at this scale is completely different. Belief Pockets already has hundreds of thousands of customers. The job isn’t solely to persuade folks that self-custody is the longer term. It’s to make that future really feel apparent within the product expertise daily. Which means listening, shifting quick, and being ruthlessly trustworthy about the place we fall quick so we are able to repair it rapidly.
The a part of my journey that ready me most? Studying that the perfect merchandise don’t have to clarify themselves. If a consumer has to learn a information to know what simply occurred, we haven’t completed constructing but.
Earlier than becoming a member of Belief Pockets, you had been often called a product chief. How does that background form the best way you consider management, particularly in a sector the place consumer belief, safety, and pace of execution all matter without delay?
Product pondering means you begin with the consumer downside, not the answer. That sounds apparent, but it surely’s genuinely uncommon in crypto, the place the default is to guide with know-how and hope customers catch up.
Once I take a look at belief, safety, and execution pace as competing priorities, I don’t see a rigidity. I see a product sequencing downside. Safety can’t be a tax on pace — if it slows customers down in a method that’s perceptible, we lose them to worse selections. So the reply is to engineer safety that protects customers earlier than they know they want safety.
That’s what our Safety Scanner does $458 million in prevented losses from malicious contracts. Customers didn’t must develop into safety specialists for that to occur. The product did the work. That’s what good product management seems like on this sector.
Crypto has gone via a number of id shifts — hypothesis, DeFi, NFTs, institutional adoption, stablecoins, AI brokers, RWAs, and extra. How would you outline the present part of the {industry}?
I’d name it the infrastructure coming of age. For years, crypto had the imaginative and prescient, however the expertise was too tough for most individuals to remain. The phases you describe, “hypothesis, DeFi, NFTs”, every added one thing actual, but in addition got here with a lot friction that solely the dedicated stayed.
What’s completely different now’s that the rails are catching up with the concepts. Onchain liquidity is deep sufficient to compete. Stablecoins have real-world utility. Tokenized RWAs are extra accessible. AI is beginning to work together with onchain methods in ways in which weren’t potential two years in the past.
We’re on the level the place the query isn’t “Can crypto do that?”, it’s “Can we make it easy sufficient that the subsequent hundred million individuals don’t must already imagine in it to attempt it?”
Self-custody is commonly framed as a precept, however for mainstream customers it could nonetheless really feel intimidating. What has to alter for self-custody to develop into as intuitive as cell banking with out compromising possession?
Three issues, so as.
First, the language has to alter. “Personal keys,” “seed phrases,” “non-custodial” and many others, these are phrases that imply one thing to insiders and nothing to everybody else. We’ve to construct merchandise that defend customers deeply with out requiring them to know the underlying mechanics. That’s how cell banking labored. You don’t understand how your financial institution’s authentication stack works. You simply really feel secure.
Second, restoration has to really feel secure. The factor that stops most individuals from making an attempt self-custody isn’t the setup — it’s the worry of shedding entry completely. Higher restoration choices, designed for actual people, not cryptographers, are some of the vital issues the {industry} wants to resolve.
Third, the encircling expertise has to match what individuals already use. If buying and selling onchain is tougher than utilizing an app they have already got, we lose. The hole is closing, although there’s nonetheless work to be carried out.
The precept of self-custody is already successful the argument. The product expertise is what has to catch up.
Belief Pockets now sits on the intersection of wallets, DeFi, funds, stablecoins, and AI. The place do you see the largest near-term use case for crypto: buying and selling, funds, financial savings, id, AI brokers, or one thing else?
Funds and buying and selling for the close to time period.
Buying and selling as a result of onchain liquidity has matured. With integrations like Hyperliquid for perps, prediction markets, and tokenized shares via bStocks, customers can do issues inside a self-custodial pockets that they’d have wanted a standard brokerage account or CEX for a couple of years in the past.
AI brokers are the class I watch most fastidiously for the medium time period. The flexibility to automate methods inside guidelines you set, whereas conserving keys in your gadget, might meaningfully change the monetary panorama. However we’re on the early-infrastructure stage there. Within the close to time period, funds and buying and selling are the place the actual use is going on.
Safety stays one in all crypto’s largest obstacles to adoption. What duty ought to wallets soak up defending customers, and the place ought to the road be between consumer sovereignty and platform-level safeguards?
Self-custody wallets ought to take important duty for safeguarding customers, and I’d push again on the concept that this creates a rigidity with sovereignty.
The false model of consumer sovereignty is: “we provide you with complete freedom and complete publicity.” That’s not empowering; that’s abandonment. Actual sovereignty means customers have full management over their belongings and actual safety towards threats they’ll’t at all times see.
Our Safety Scanner function has flagged over $458 million directed at malicious contracts, and helped alert customers to greater than $191 million in suspicious transactions in 2025 alone. Our Deal with Poisoning Safety, a function that detects lookalike rip-off addresses in real-time and alerts customers earlier than they ship funds, is the most recent addition to Belief Pockets’s industry-leading safety stack. Customers don’t have to know handle poisoning or malicious good contracts to be protected against them. That’s what we should always anticipate from a pockets.
The road I draw is that this: we warn, we defend, we give customers the data to decide — however we don’t make choices for them. If a consumer desires to work together with one thing our safety methods flag as dangerous, we inform them clearly, after which we respect their alternative. Sovereignty with data is the objective. Sovereignty with out data isn’t freedom, it’s publicity.
Regulation is changing into clearer in some markets whereas others stay fragmented or unsure. How ought to pockets corporations like Belief Pockets navigate the steadiness between decentralization, compliance, and consumer entry throughout completely different jurisdictions?
Regulatory readability is genuinely good for this {industry}. Uncertainty can create extra issues than it solves; for customers, for builders, and for the long-term credibility of crypto.
What’s vital to know is what Belief Pockets is and isn’t. We’re a self-custodial software program interface. We don’t maintain buyer funds, we don’t function markets, we don’t match orders, and we’re not anybody’s counterparty. That’s a distinct regulatory dialog than the one centralized exchanges are having.
Our strategy is to interact constructively the place wanted, be clear about how the product works, and ensure the customers have entry to the perfect accessible companies. When regulation creates actual readability, it helps us by setting clear expectations for the {industry}.
What I’d push again on is regulation as a barrier to entry. The populations who profit most from self-custody — individuals with out entry to conventional banking, individuals in economies with forex instability — are sometimes the least served by fragmented regulatory environments. Good regulation ought to defend customers, not exclude them.
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