Bitcoin may not seem as though it needs much help these days, having soared more than 400% over the past 12 months, but the industry surrounding digital currencies and blockchain—the cryptocurrency’s underlying technology—needs to address some major issues if it is going to be viable for a broad and mainstream consumer base.

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That’s according to Abigail Johnson, the chief executive officer of Fidelity Investments, one of the biggest champions of bitcoin and blockchain among traditional financial-services companies.

“I like to think that huge new markets and products will be built on these platforms,” she said at Consensus, a blockchain-centric conference put on by digital currency site CoinDesk. “But before that can happen, we need to address the barriers there are to adoption—and there are several.”

Fidelity has made inroads into blockchain, according to Johnson’s keynote address, including venture investments, partnerships, and its own initiatives, but “most of our experiments have hit one roadblock or another due to the emerging nature of the technology.”

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She cited four primary “roadblocks” that needed to be addressed.

1). Technological shortcomings

The first concerns blockchain technology itself, about which she said there were “still questions to be answered,” though she was “confident that there’s good progress being made in this area.”

“We understand there are important trade-offs that need to get made as these systems grow,” Johnson said. “We care about the trade-off between scalability, privacy, and achieving peer-to-peer settlement. It seems right now you can’t have all three.”

Of these three, Johnson said that privacy was the most important, calling it “a core customer need” that was an area of investment for Fidelity initiatives.

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2). Regulation

Johnson called regulation “the policy challenge,” arguing that innovation in the blockchain industry was happening so fast “that it is outpacing the regulator’s ability to keep up.” Regulators will have a steep learning curve, she added, “and that will cause some growing pains.”

Earlier this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled against a product that would have led to the first bitcoin-tracking exchange-traded fund, citing a lack of regulation in the marketplace.

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“We need to continue to work with regulators to have an open dialogue about this technology,” Johnson said, adding that Fidelity was working with Coin Center, a nonprofit focused on cryptocurrency policy issues, to help the nascent industry engage with regulators.

3). Control

Johnson’s third roadblock involves “control,” as she put it. “Networks like bitcoin, by design, have no formalized management structure,” she said. “They’re open projects, which is great, but companies like ours, that build products on these platforms, don’t have the clarity on the future path they might take, or how to influence the developer communities.”

“The financial services industry will need to work to understand the risks associated with who controls the features of these new systems,” she said.

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4). “Human problem”

“The human problem,” is Johnson’s reference to how bitcoin and blockchain are often seen as “solutions in search of a problem.” Consumers won’t feel comfortable using these technologies, she implied, if they had few obvious applications for their daily life. “We need to come up with use cases for this technology that drives clear benefits for individuals and institutions.”

Right now, “you won’t find a lot of compelling use cases” for the technology, “at least, not ones that can be implemented at scale.”

“ “We need to come up with use cases for this technology that drives clear benefits for individuals and institutions.” ” — Abigail Johnson, chief executive officer of Fidelity Investments

She added, “If you’re looking to beat Visa V, -1.29% at the point of sale today, you’ll be disappointed. If you look at it as a faster settlement system for financial systems, you’ll also be disappointed.”

Johnson said the cafeteria in the Fidelity headquarters recently began to accept payment in bitcoin—doubling the number of places in Boston that did, she joked. Once, she said, an early bitcoin adopter in the office performed an experiment where he attempted to use it in the way he did traditional money. He was able to purchase a drink, but not return it, a limitation that caused great frustration and underlined the ways bitcoin isn’t yet making things easier for consumers on a daily basis.

“We don’t just need these systems to be technically better; we need them to be more user friendly,” Johnson said.

Despite these issues, Johnson said she was optimistic about the future of these technologies.

“Even we at Fidelity can see that the evolution of technology is setting up our industry for disruption,” she said. “What if this new technology could do for the transfer of value what the internet did for the transfer of information? Blockchain isn’t just a new way to settle transactions; it can fundamentally change market structure, or maybe even the architecture of the internet itself. When combined with things like the Internet of Things or the cloud, there’s no underestimating the potential that’s on the horizon.”

The price of one bitcoin rose 8.8% to a new record of $2,493.33 on Wednesday, according to CoinDesk. It is up 455% over the past 12 months, and more than 150% thus far in 2017.