Bitcoin is up over 400% in the past year—what’s stopping it from going mainstream?

Abigail Johnson says bitcoin is grappling with technological and regulatory issues, as well as what to use it for in the first place

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.

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.”