Opinion: User experience is not the main barrier to crypto's mass adoption
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Opinion: User experience is not the main barrier to crypto's mass adoption
The deeper problem with crypto isn't user experience—it's that it's not useful enough.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: mhonkasalo
Compiled by: TechFlow
The deeper problem with crypto isn't user experience—it's that it's not useful enough.
User experience is most commonly seen as the key obstacle to "mainstream adoption" of crypto. The list of complaints goes like this:
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Gas fees are strange and unintuitive—what even is “MATIC”?
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Non-human-readable addresses—what’s with that “0x…” string?
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Recovery phrases feel odd—what are these 12 words for?
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Using so many different chains feels weird—how is Arbitrum actually different?
These are all valid issues worth solving.
However, I believe the extent to which they hinder “mainstream adoption” has been greatly exaggerated.
Currently, the common mantra is “abstract away the complexity of crypto.”
Problems Millennials Solved, Gen Z Doesn’t Care About
Sometimes I wonder—are we (say, over 28—I’m 29) the generation obsessing over UX problems that only exist in our heads, while younger, more tech-savvy users simply don’t care?The mindset of great product managers is always about simplifying user experience.
But imagine, if it were the early 2000s, what kind of UX concerns a modern tech product manager might have raised about email:
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People will never understand the “@” symbol.
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Why does every address end with .com or .org?
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Why can users pick arbitrary email names? How do you even know you’re emailing the right Bob Smith?
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What is “Gmail”? Why does everyone need to know their provider?
If email hadn’t already gained traction, and was subjected to today’s product management scrutiny, we’d have a thousand PMs tweaking tiny details without improving actual usage.
While these could be framed as UX issues in the absence of adoption:
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Younger generations don’t care.
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Older people eventually learned what the “@” symbol means.
Many people figured out how to send tokens to addresses starting with “0x…” the moment they realized they could trade altcoins on Binance and make money.
I’m confident that if 13- to 17-year-olds loved playing some super fun crypto game, nearly everyone would figure it out within a week.
Summary
Yes, crypto has UX issues—but they’re not that significant.
If the technology is useful enough—that is, if it’s genuinely fun or offers strong economic incentives—UX stops being a real barrier.
In my view, the much-hyped UX obstacles aren’t major hurdles. Learning about different chains, bridges, and gas fees isn’t a dealbreaker for a generation willing to learn—and others will adapt out of necessity.
The deeper problem with crypto isn’t UX—it’s that it’s not useful enough.
That’s okay. The benefit of software like crypto is that it keeps improving and may eventually cross the threshold of “broad usefulness.” It already exists in niche areas—for example, international transfers via stablecoins.
Crypto winters don’t slow down industry progress. Look at the most popular applications (by TVL or any ranking)—notice how many were built with minimal funding (Uniswap, Aave, etc.). As far as I can tell, there’s no correlation between investor interest and actual progress.
My prediction: if/when crypto goes mainstream, it will still have many strange UX quirks—and unless organic adoption naturally masks them, they’ll be seen as harmful.
The issues listed above will get resolved, but I don’t believe they’re the true barriers to adoption.
Even if every single one were perfectly solved, I don’t think we’d see significantly more users.
The paths to driving adoption are either (1) fun or (2) economics:
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A crypto-native game compelling enough to draw users in;
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A safe way to earn competitive yields in USD terms.
(The critical caveat being key management, which remains the most uncomfortable part even for OGs.)
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@mhonkasalo
