Stéph, Founder and CEO of Peach Bitcoin
Why real financial innovation means giving users ownership, not just access
FTX wasn’t a crypto problem. It was a custody problem.
When it collapsed, billions in customer deposits vanished overnight. Not because the blockchain failed, but because people had trusted an intermediary that didn’t deserve it.
And while traditional finance was quick to frame it as another crypto scandal, the uncomfortable truth is that the same design flaw runs through much of fintech: users don’t really own their money. They rent it from an app.
The illusion of ownership
Most fintech products are built on custody. Your money sits somewhere else, and what you see on your screen is just a reflection. An IOU wrapped in a great user interface.
We’ve been trained to value convenience over control. Tap to pay, click to send, scan to invest. But behind the scenes, every one of those transactions passes through a chain of custodians, processors, and counterparties.
In a world that sells financial freedom as a UX experience, the fine print still reads: you don’t actually hold it.
When things go wrong e.g. your app freezes to bank outages to fraud investigations, users are reminded just how little control they have.
Custody isn’t a technical flaw. It’s a design flaw.
Fintech’s growth has been driven by a design philosophy that prioritises frictionless over fail-safe. The idea that users shouldn’t have to think about custody became the norm.
But friction isn’t the enemy. The right kind of friction, transparency, verification, user agency, is what creates durable trust.
Bitcoin builders have internalised this lesson. Instead of designing systems that abstract control away, they’re designing systems that hand it back.
Self-custody is not about ideology. It’s about resilience.
When users hold their own assets, risk becomes distributed, not concentrated. Fraud becomes harder. Downtime affects fewer people. Transparency isn’t a feature; it’s the foundation.
Why the future won’t be frictionless
The next evolution of fintech won’t come from faster payments or prettier dashboards. It will come from rebuilding how we handle custody.
That means products that are self-custodial by default: where users hold their own keys, data is encrypted end-to-end, and privacy is a built-in feature, not an add-on.
It also means rethinking the narrative that control and convenience are opposites. They’re not. Modern Bitcoin apps are proving that it’s possible to build intuitive, mobile-first experiences that give users true financial sovereignty without complexity.
Real innovation won’t mean doing everything for the user. It will mean designing systems where users can do things for themselves safely, easily, and privately.
Rebuilding trust by returning control
Fintech’s next big challenge isn’t scaling faster or integrating new rails. It’s learning humility and accepting that technology should serve ownership, not replace it.
When you give users custody, you give them more than security. You give them confidence.
And confidence, once earned, doesn’t need marketing. It compounds.
The future of finance won’t belong to whoever removes the most friction. It’ll belong to whoever returns the most control.
About the author:
Stéph (@proofofsteph) is the founder and CEO of Peach Bitcoin, a European peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange. She’s a product-first CEO with a background in fintech and UX, focused on making self-custody and privacy simple enough for everyone.
