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We are losing. For all the talk about sovereignty, decentralization and Web3 revolutions, the cold reality is that the crypto industry has failed to cross the threshold into everyday life. We have built Byzantine castles in the clouds – protocols and networks of breathtaking beauty and complexity – only to discover that no one but us Ivory Tower wants to live in them. The “next billion users” aren’t coming, not because they don’t care about decentralization, but because we’ve made it virtually impossible for them to participate. We speak of empowerment and freedom, but deliver friction and exclusivity.
Summary
- Crypto risks irrelevance by building for engineers, not regular users, and burying the promise of financial freedom under jargon, complexity, and fragmented interfaces.
- Mass adoption has stalled at around 5% of global ownership as onboarding remains intimidating, from initial sentences to unpredictable gas rates and failed transactions.
- In consumer tech, UX wins – and in a world where TikTok’s attention span is long, crypto apps must become as seamless as Apple Pay, Venmo or Revolut to compete.
- The future of DeFi belongs to the platforms that design vertically – deeply integrating with real human needs – rather than endlessly multiplying chains, tokens and protocols for insiders.
Crypto has become a mirror that endlessly reflects its own obsessions. Layer-2s proliferate, chains split, and tokenomics evolve, yet the average person finds crypto scary, obscure, or just plain useless. As the world hungers for better financial tools – faster money transfers, stable savings, cross-border payments – we are building puzzles for ourselves. If we don’t wake up and build for people, and not just engineers, hackers and developers, we risk becoming the QWERTY Blackberry of the financial world: brilliant, principled and completely irrelevant.
Crypto could very well repeat the fate of QWERTY smartphones’ obscurity if we don’t adapt to simplified UX. Imagine a new user trying to join the crypto space for the first time. A user may need to download a wallet, custodial versus non-custodial, understand the difference between L1s and L2s, how to stash assets (likely losing time and money), then pay (unpredictable) gas fees in native tokens they may not yet own, figure out why a transaction failed, what Etherscan is and how to use it, and so on.
It’s a UX nightmare wrapped in an unfamiliar language barrier, delivered via platforms that feel more like developer sandboxes than consumer-ready products. There is a fundamental contradiction at the core of web3. On the one hand, it claims to democratize the financial world and empower the individual. On the other hand, it expects that same person to understand basic phrases, slippage tolerance, RPC endpoints, gas rates, and multi-sig governance.
There is no mass adoption
The research estimates that around 5% of the world’s population own cryptocurrencies. And for them, crypto’s promise to redefine money, ownership and trust has been fulfilled. But most of these owners are developers, technology enthusiasts and early adopters. But more than a decade into its existence, let’s face the uncomfortable truth: crypto has failed to get regular people on board.
Mass adoption has been promised dozens of times, from the ICO boom of 2017 to DeFi summer of 2020, from memcoins to AI agents and artificial intelligence in general, from stablecoins to compliance and regulation, but crypto is still not ready for it. Why? The industry is self-centered; it builds and is built for itself.
Complexity as a barrier
We live in a time where TikTok consciously rules the world. The average attention time of current users on the Internet is between 7 and 15 seconds. Facts shows that for the average app, only about a third of users return within 24 hours of first use, and that drops even further to 10-15%. And I’m talking about regular apps with intuitive navigation and usability. Crypto apps often leave you with an empty wallet and no clear next step. You’re on your own, figure out how to finance, secure and understand what you just signed.
This gap is a strategic failure. Because in consumer tech, the product with the better user experience usually wins, not the product with the most ideology. Meanwhile, global demand for accessible financial instruments is growing. In many parts of the world, inflation is eating away at savings and transfer fees are still illegal. Even the ‘safe haven’ of global finance, the US dollar, shows this worst results since 1973, with a decline in value of more than 10%. Crypto could provide a lifeline. But that lifeline is tangled in jargon and incompatible wallets.
Web3 prides itself on its sovereignty: users control their keys, their data, and their fate. But sovereignty without utility becomes a kind of tyranny. Expecting regular users to shoulder the entire burden of security and understanding – without any margin for error – is not empowering.
Compare this to the experience of using Apple Pay, Venmo, Revolut, or any other web2 counterpart. The interfaces are clean, onboarding takes seconds, and risk is abstracted behind account recovery and biometric authentication. It’s not that users don’t care about security; it’s that they need usability.
Crypto will not get a second chance at mass adoption. The next billion users will not arrive because the technology becomes more powerful or token prices become higher. They will come when the products are simpler, faster and safer. And of course better than what they already have.
The irony is that crypto has the infrastructure to deliver extraordinary financial freedom. But without a radical shift to user-centric thinking, that freedom will remain locked behind interfaces that only early adopters can understand. Ultimately, it is not the code or the consensus mechanism that decides adoption. It’s user experience.
Designing for simplicity in web3
Simplifying UX in crypto is not about removing complexity by sacrificing key features of decentralized finance, but about managing it wisely. Ultimately, the platform that wins this race will not be the one with the best tokenomics or the deepest protocol integrations. It will be the one that makes crypto feel effortless, without asking users to leave behind control or security.
Crypto is awash with innovation. But most of these innovations are horizontal: new chains, new L2s, new tokens, new DeFi protocols, etc., not vertical, which means deeper integration with human needs. This points to a deeper problem: crypto builders often build for each other, not for the people they claim to serve. The design language, developer-focused documentation, and fragmented UI flows reinforce the sense that crypto is not a product, but a puzzle.
There are billions of users ready for empowerment through decentralized finance; let’s get crypto ready for them.
