Digital wallets have won the payments war. By mid-2025, about 65% of U.S. adults were using them, accounting for 39% of e-commerce and 16% of in-store transactions.
Apple Pay and PayPal are boring infrastructure these days, the default way millions transfer money without thinking about it.
Web3 wallets are not. This was evident from a September survey by Mercuryo and Protocol Theory among 3,428 American adults only 13% consider crypto wallets intuitiveand only 12% say they fit naturally into the way they handle money.
By comparison, 75% and 64% say the same about traditional digital wallets. The gap is not marginal, but structural. Most Americans have never seen a Web3 wallet in real life, and this week there were two direct attempts to fill that gap.
Aave launched a savings app offering up to 9% APY with balance protection, with a limit of $1 million. Meanwhile, Mastercard expanded its Crypto reference system to manage wallets on Polygon itself, replacing hexadecimal addresses with verified usernames.
Both borrow heavily from mainstream financial UX, high-yield savings accounts and KYC-verified aliases, and both are betting that making DeFi less foreign will attract the wallet-curious majority still on the sidelines.
The question is whether better UX alone can deliver a 13% intuitive score, or whether the problem runs deeper than just polishing the interface and headlines.
The perception problem
The Mercuryo data shows portfolios stratified by income and fame. More than half of Americans making more than $100,000 now own crypto, compared to about one in four making less than $40,000.
Higher income earners are almost three times as likely to use self-custody wallets. Lower-income users cluster in transactional corridors, such as money transfer corridors and Bitcoin ATMs, where fees can reach 15% to 20%.
The researchers describe this as crypto that quietly entrenches inequality instead of solving it.
That skew matters because it shows Web3 wallets as specialized tools for the affluent and tech-confident, and not for mass-market infrastructure.
Meanwhile, digital wallets have entered the mainstream by doing the opposite: they abstract complexity, require no new mental model, and connect directly to existing bank accounts and cards.
PayPal does not ask users to manage seed phrases or understand gas. Apple Pay does not disclose public key cryptography. Web3 wallets do, and Mercuryo’s research shows that most people find that cognitively strange and intimidating.
The adoption ceiling is not about awareness. Cryptocurrency ownership has been steadily increasing. The ceiling is appropriate about every day. Only 16% of respondents have ever personally witnessed a Web3 wallet transaction, and many describe addresses and basic phrases as clunky and scary.
It’s not possible to normalize something that still feels like a subculture ritual.
Aave wraps DeFi in a savings account shell
Aave’s new app tries to solve this by hiding the protocol completely. The iOS app positions itself as a retail savings product that pays out up to 9% APY through a mix of base returns and task-based bonuses for identity verification, automatic savings and referrals.
The marketing explicitly compares this to traditional savings: US accounts average about 0.4% APY, while high-yield accounts are in the 3%-4% range.
Data from independent banks confirms that the highest high-yield savings rates are around 4% to 5%, while the broader average is closer to 0.2%.
Aave also promises up to $1 million in balance sheet protection, which is marketed as coverage well above the FDIC’s $250,000 limit.
Follow-up reporting makes it clear that this is commercial insurance specific to the custody app, not FDIC deposit insurance or Aave’s on-chain security module, and the provider remains undisclosed.
Technically, users have no control over the keys. The deposits are located in ERC-4337 smart accounts managed by an Aave Guardian Multisig, with access keys and session keys completely stripping out the seed phrases.
That architecture allows Aave to deliver the “scary” parts, gas, contract interaction, private key custody, deletion and instant withdrawals, support for more than 12,000 banks and cards, and a user interface that looks identical to a fintech savings app.
Users see expected earnings, recurring deposits and a balance. They don’t see Ethereum, lending pools, or transaction logs.
It’s a classic ‘CeDeFi’ trade-off, with custody risk and potential censorship at the UX layer in exchange for zero friction.
The app works like a bank, because it works functionally like that. The difference is that the returns engine runs on Aave’s proven lending protocol rather than fractional reserve banking, and the “bank” cannot lend out customer deposits to other borrowers without transparent collateral in the chain.
For the 87% of Americans who find Web3 wallets unintuitive, this may be the only version of DeFi they will ever tolerate. The open question is whether this path increases wallet literacy or recreates the bank rails on the chain with better rates.
Mastercard is addressing the addressing problem
Mastercard’s Crypto Credential expansion addresses another UX friction: the fear of getting it wrong.
Sending money in a long hexadecimal string brings obvious anxiety to regular users who are used to Venmo handles and email-based payments.
Mastercard, Mercuryo and Polygon are now expanding Crypto Credential to self-managed wallets, issuing human-readable aliases that point to verified wallets on Polygon.
Users complete KYC with Mercuryo, receive a username, and can mint a soul-bound token indicating their wallet participates in Travel Rule-compliant transfers.
The goal is to make sending crypto “as intuitive as fiat transfers” by replacing addresses with verified names while giving apps a standard way to route and validate transactions.
This is a direct attack on the cognitive load that Mercuryo’s research highlights. Aliases make the blockchain layer invisible.
They are also deploying more KYC and compliance infrastructure, bringing self-control closer to the feel of a regulated fintech, even as users still hold the keys.
That could be a marker for the segment most likely to adopt: affluent, compliance-conscious users already familiar with Apple Pay, usernames and fraud monitoring.
The system assumes that regular users want Web3 to feel like Web2 payments, only with better settlement and portability guarantees.
This assumption could prove correct for the upper-middle class cohort already inclined toward digital wallets. It does less for people who pay 20% fees at Bitcoin ATMs in strip malls or for users who valued crypto precisely because it didn’t require KYC gatekeepers.
Two adoption curves that have not converged
Digital wallets became normal because they were invisible. They required no new behavior, were well-known branded, and worked wherever cards worked.
Web3 wallets remain specialized tools because they expose the underlying machinery, addresses, keys, gas, finality of transactions, and require users to understand concepts that most have no reason to learn.
Aave’s app and Mastercard’s aliases are trying to bridge that gap by borrowing UX patterns from banking and Big Tech.
Aave packages a credit protocol into a high-yield savings interface, with insurance-style messaging and custody simplicity.
Mastercard wraps wallet addresses into verified usernames with KYC and compliance rails baked in. Both trade some of the promises of decentralization, resistance to censorship and permissionless access, for mainstream readability.
That trade could move the needle for wallet-curious savers and traders who already use fintech apps and want returns without learning Solidity. It may attract the segment that finds 9% APY attractive but finds MetaMask intimidating.
It won’t in itself move the 13% intuitiveness figure if the deeper issues are around cost, trust and access rather than polishing the interface.
The Mercuryo data suggests that crypto’s UX crisis is also a class crisis. Affluent users get streamlined apps, verified aliases, and assured returns. Lower income users get predatory ATMs and money transfer corridors.
If Aave and Mastercard succeed, they will likely be the first to grow at the top of that distribution, making Web3 more palatable to people who already like Apple Pay and Robinhood.
Whether they can solve the broader adoption problem depends on whether regular users actually want what Web3 offers once the components that make Web3 are removed.
A 9% yield is attractive until regulators reduce it to 4%. A verified username is useful until it becomes a bottleneck.
At that point, users wonder whether they’ve built a better savings account or just a more complicated savings account.
The intuitiveness score of 13% is not a UX problem. It’s a signal that most people don’t yet see a reason to learn a new financial operating system.
Better yields and cleaner interfaces help, but they only matter if the underlying system provides something that traditional Rails can’t. Aave and Mastercard are betting that this is the case. The coming year will show whether the other 87% agree.
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