The next billion crypto users won’t care about blockchain | Opinion

Crypto’s biggest problem right now is that it’s just too difficult. The average web3 app requires a level of technical skill that most people lack, and until that changes, very few will be willing to cut the industry any slack. 

Just getting started with crypto is hard enough, with the need to set up a wallet, safely store a seed phrase, and then work out how to actually buy some. Then you have all those different networks. Let’s face it, crypto’s complexity creates a huge barrier to entry. It’s almost like going out to eat a meal, but visiting different restaurants to order each separate ingredient. Visit one place for the steak, a fast food outlet for the fries, and a bistro to order the gravy. And don’t forget to bring a separate currency for each transaction. 

People aren’t going to do that, and they’re not going to start using blockchain because they’re suddenly convinced that decentralization is to die for. But give them a really good app that just happens to be built on the blockchain, make it intuitive to use, and suddenly they’ll be hooked. 

Blockchain must go!

Sadly, very few people in the crypto industry are trying to build such an app. Instead, they’re barking up the wrong tree with their convictions about ideological purity and arguments about the best way to scale. They waste their time talking about educating users and the benefits of decentralization, while lying to themselves that these things will help crypto take off. 

The truth is, they won’t. Outside a handful of blockchain geeks, no one cares about decentralization, and no one is going to spend hours trying to learn about it. The prospect of “greater financial inclusion” is not going to get your grandmother so hyped that she starts poking around YouTube looking for how to set up a crypto wallet. 

If the crypto industry is ever going to convince the next billion users to get on board with blockchain, it needs to focus on abstraction, not education or decentralization. The goal must be to make blockchain “disappear,” in the same way the TCP/IP protocol that underpins the internet to work is invisible to 99% of its users. By removing the technical know-how and jargon associated with blockchain, we can make web3 applications as useful and as easy to use as traditional smartphone apps. Do that, and greater adoption will come. 

The internet learned this lesson when it switched from typing out IP numbers to entering a plain language address, and later just clicking links. It was a small change, but it had a dramatic impact in terms of making the web accessible, and it’s exactly the kind of thing blockchain needs today.   

Quite a lot can be done to make blockchain disappear. Right now, people are turned off by many of its peculiarities, like seed phrases, private keys (what’s the difference?!), the long random wallet addresses, gas fees, bridging, liquidity, and such. Abstraction means making these things disappear, so users can interact with crypto and web3 in the same way as they do with their email or social media accounts. 

Abstraction in practice

We don’t know exactly how abstraction would work, but we do know what needs to be done. To start with, creating a wallet should be as simple as entering an email address and password, and users must be given a foolproof way to recover that password in case they forget it. If everyone has to write down and hide a seed phrase, it’s just not going to work. 

Then we can do away with the multitude of wallets we need to engage with different networks. What we want is a single wallet that consolidates all of our funds in a single place so that we can send and receive money from any other wallet. The technical part, using cross-chain bridges to send funds across different networks, signing approvals, making sure you have enough funds to pay the gas fees — all that needs to disappear and be replaced with a single click.

Smart contracts should also go the way of TCP/IP, because people don’t care how they work, so long as they work. Liquidity is another thing that needs to disappear, but we also need more of it, so users can swap tokens without delays. Make sure it’s there so transactions will work, but don’t concern people with the details. Gas fees must be simpler, too. Let people pay in any token, so they don’t have to “hold” Ethereum (ETH) just to be able to send USDC (USDC). Otherwise, it’s just too confusing.

Let’s make crypto work

There’s a reason why social media apps like Facebook and Instagram are so incredibly popular. It’s because there’s basically no learning curve whatsoever. You open the app, and it just works intuitively, and that’s what gets people hooked. 

Abstraction must become blockchain’s Holy Grail. We need to remove all of the complexity and struggles so people can actually see what web3 has to offer. It’s past time that we made this happen. The internet only began taking shape in the 1980s, but by 2001, more than 55% of Americans were already online — mainstream adoption was achieved in next to no time. 

Meanwhile, crypto is well into its second decade, and it’s nothing like as popular as the web was at the same age. Lots of progress has been made. We see thousands of different coins and blockchains and real-world assets and NFTs, but people are still juggling multiple wallets and seed phrases and scratching their heads about cross-chain bridges. Crypto remains overwhelming, whereas the internet was already driving on autopilot by this time. 

Blockchain must disappear, so the user only sees useful, entertaining, and addictive applications that add value to their lives. Crypto needs to stop focusing on the ideological discussions and the intricacies of layer-2 networks and debating which one is best. No one cares. All they want to see is a seamless application that actually works, rather than trying to figure out how it works.