by Bidemi Oke
https://www.digital.zenithbank.com/ZEQ/ZEQ-jan-2026/index.html#p=1The first time a customer asks, is this platform safe? They are rarely asking about your technology. They are asking a much more difficult question. What happens if something goes wrong?
For years, the crypto industry treated regulation as the enemy of innovation. Regulators were seen as people who did not understand the technology. Businesses feared that excessive rules would slow down innovation. Users, meanwhile, were left to navigate a market where trust was often built on reputation, online communities and the confidence of whoever was speaking the loudest.
A market does not become trustworthy simply because it is innovative, and regulation does not automatically make it trustworthy either. This is the part of the conversation we often get wrong.
Regulation is not trust; it is the architecture that makes trust possible at scale. When a market is small, people can rely heavily on personal relationships. You know the founder. You know someone who knows the founder. You can call somebody when there is a problem.
That does not work when millions of people are moving money through systems they have never seen, operated by companies they may never meet, across borders and jurisdictions they may not understand. At that point, trust has to move from being personal to being institutional. That transition is especially important for crypto.
The technology can be decentralised, but the customer experience is not. People still want to know who is responsible for protecting customer funds, how transactions are monitored, what happens when an account is compromised, how complaints are handled and whether there is a real person or institution accountable when things go wrong.
This is where regulation can play its most important role, not by telling people to trust a company but by making it harder for companies to ask for trust without earning it.
Rather than viewing regulation as a maze of legal obligations, I evaluate it through three simple lenses.
First is transparency. People should never have to guess how a financial platform works. The fundamentals ought to be obvious: how customer assets are safeguarded, where risks exist, who bears responsibility at each stage, and what recourse users have if something goes wrong. Regulation is at its best when it removes ambiguity instead of creating more of it.
