Research: Why 53% of verified users never bought Bitcoin
- Company
Swan Bitcoin- Role
- Senior Product Designer · Research lead
- Timeline
- 4 weeks
- Scope
- First-time purchase experience
- Status
- Research informing the first-buy experience
Buying Bitcoin was the app’s primary use case. Yet 53% of users who passed KYC never made a purchase. More than half of verified users were stopping short of the product’s core value. I led the research with a clear goal: identify potential barriers, concerns and areas for improvement that could influence these users’ purchase decisions.
The 53% figure located the drop-off; understanding its causes required listening to customers. Waiting for a better price, lacking funds, struggling to transfer money and not knowing what to do next could all lead to the same outcome. The challenge was to understand these different reasons before deciding what the product should change.
A useful response depended on understanding both the customer’s situation and the purchase experience. I triangulated qualitative survey responses and interviews with quantitative product metrics and anonymized customer logs. Comparing these sources helped me distinguish purchase readiness from funding and usability barriers. The resulting product direction connected account creation, bank linking and the first purchase into one guided experience, removing the need for new users to navigate a generic dashboard before starting their first purchase.
Passed KYC without making a Bitcoin purchase.
Exploring the reasons behind the missing first purchase.
Understanding the context behind those decisions.
How I led the design research
Collaboration: Product, research participants, engineering, compliance and leadership
- 1
Framed the investigation around why 53% of users who passed KYC never made a Bitcoin purchase.
- 2
Combined a survey of 100 users with seven customer interviews to explore their reasons, concerns and expectations around a first purchase.
- 3
Prepared interview scripts and a consistent framework for tracing the journey from verification through funding and purchase.
- 4
Built four interactive prototypes representing different end-to-end product models.
- 5
Triangulated qualitative survey and interview findings with quantitative product metrics and anonymized customer logs to cross-check emerging explanations.
- 6
Turned findings into an all-hands narrative and recommendations for removing friction from the first experience through a direct purchase entry point, earlier bank linking and a connected first-buy journey.
What informed the direction
Qualitative responses from a survey of 100 users captured their stated reasons and concerns about making a first purchase.
Seven customer interviews added qualitative depth around people’s circumstances, expectations and hesitation.
Quantitative product metrics established the scale of the problem: 53% of users who passed KYC never made a purchase.
Anonymized customer logs added context and helped cross-check patterns emerging from the surveys, interviews and product metrics.
To understand the reasons behind the 53% drop-off, we asked customers who had not made a purchase: “You haven’t made a Bitcoin purchase, what factors or concerns have influenced this decision?”
Turning research into themes
I grouped the insights into themes, keeping the customer evidence alongside each cluster. Themes around uncertainty about buying, funding and bank details informed a more direct path to buying and earlier bank linking. Other themes, including payment status, fees and custody, remained part of the wider research context rather than problems these changes alone would resolve.
Key decisions
Remove friction from the first experience
Customers described uncertainty about how to buy. That supported giving new users a clear purchase entry point immediately after account creation. The new experience took users directly into buying Bitcoin instead of asking them to navigate a generic dashboard, removing an extra step and making the next action explicit.
Bring bank linking into sign-up
Transfer difficulties and themes around funding and bank details showed that getting money into the purchase journey needed attention. Adding a bank account during sign-up brought this prerequisite into the guided setup, so users encountered it as part of preparing to buy rather than as a separate task to discover later.
Carry the first experience through to a purchase
The 53% purchase gap showed that passing KYC was not enough to reach the app’s core value. Four interactive prototypes explored the full journey across registration, verification, funding and purchase. The final experience connected these steps so users could link their bank and complete their first Bitcoin purchase during their initial experience, instead of reaching the dashboard with the buying journey still ahead of them.
What changed
-
Removed the dashboard detour after account creation, giving new users a direct path into their first Bitcoin purchase.
-
Moved bank-account linking into sign-up, making funding setup part of the first-time journey.
-
Connected account creation, bank linking and buying so customers could complete their first purchase in their initial experience.
-
Grounded these changes in the research on purchase uncertainty and funding friction, while distinguishing those barriers from personal readiness and market timing.
What I would carry into the next problem
The research shifted the focus from opening an account to helping a ready customer complete a first purchase. Uncertainty about how to buy supported removing the dashboard detour and making the purchase path explicit; funding difficulties supported bringing bank linking into sign-up; and the gap between verification and purchase supported connecting the steps into one first-time experience.
These changes addressed barriers the product could influence. Customers waiting for money or a different price had separate reasons to hold off. The next step would be to measure bank-link completion, first-purchase completion and time to first purchase, alongside any added sign-up drop-off. The 53% figure describes the original problem, not a measured result of the redesign.
