Thank you all for your input. Here’s what I've gathered:

1. Distrust in centralized exchanges (CEX) and traditional finance platforms.
2. Use CEX for trade execution certainty, but prefer decentralized exchanges (DEX) when possible. Best practice: transfer funds to your own wallet after using CEX, though many don’t follow this.
3. Blockchain and DEX eliminate intermediaries, yet people still seek intermediaries for trust, which often fail.
4. Trusted and transparent financial institutions are rare or non-existent for most people.

CEX appeals to non-advanced crypto users for easier onboarding, trading, and better support. Are there any CEX that you believe build trust and safety effectively, or is this still lacking today?

Dear Friends,

I am working on a startup idea focused on trust and transparency within financial institutions and would love to hear your thoughts and insights. Our goal is to determine how can we truly trust the financial institution that hold our money, specifically around the crypto market but broadly around all financial institutions. While these questions center around crypto, please answer it whether you know crypto at all or bank with any digital banking institutions.

Specifically, I am hoping to solve the problem of whether we accelerate the building of trust with a company and its customers using a technology platform. Your help here would be immensely useful.

Product Survey Introduction
Trust is hard to build and can be lost instantly. Really, the only way for an institution to be “trusted” is to be around for a really long time or be the “biggest” but we all know that being the biggest in the industry such as Silicon Valley Bank, Lehmans, Enron, in crypto FTX/Binance/Quadriga/MtGox, does not mean they are trustworthy. So how do we know who we can trust when even our biggest institutions have let us down? The status quo has not changed despite the failures of multiple industries we’ve seen in the past few years. How do we hold these financial institutions accountable for their actions?
We’re a small stealth startup passionate to change the status quo and are looking to solve the problem of trust in the crypto space. What we hope to build is a product that can help companies who are truly authentic, to build trust with users in a meaningful way, and conversely, a way for users to validate and authenticate a company’s on and off-chain activities as legitimate.

We want to figure out what information you use to determine how to trust financial institutions that are holding your money. While everything on the blockchain is 100% transparent, there are many things that operate outside the blockchain in Crypto (Fiat transactions, daily operations etc) that create incentive for bad actors to cheat (i.e FTX using client funds to cover trading losses).

We are trying to conduct user research to understand if the product we’re building will solve the problem of trust and transparency in the financial industry and really need your help!

Please fill out the google survey here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf8aVTYmAHx0qJYhR1Wt5bQf5zSnQXtWI73C2El1N8lz1Kd5Q/viewform?usp=sf_link

Thank you for all your help and support!
Sincerely,
Ian