Opinion: Cryptocurrencies Don’t Have a User Experience Problem

User experience is most often cited as a barrier to “mainstream adoption” of cryptocurrencies.

The sequence of statements goes like this:

• Gsd fees are weird and hard to understand, "what the hell is MATIC?"
• Non-human-readable addresses are weird and hard to understand, "what the hell is this 0x... string?".
• Private key management is weird and it's hard to understand, "What the hell are those 12 words?"
• It's weird to use so many different chains, and it's hard to understand, "What the hell is this Arbitrum?"

These are problems worth addressing. However, I think their importance as practical barriers to mainstream use is overstated.

A common refrain is "abstracting the complexity of cryptocurrencies".

Baby boomers tackle Gen Z issues

I sometimes wonder if we (say, 28+) are baby boomers who are solving our imagined UX problems that younger, more tech-savvy folks don't care about.

With the mentality of a good product manager in a FANG company, we are committed to simplifying the user experience.

However, if this were the early 2000s, imagine how a product manager would comment on an email like this:

• People will never understand the "@" symbol.
• Why does it have .com or .org at the end?
• Why can users choose email at will? How do you know you're texting the right person if the other person's name is Bob Smith?
• What is "Gmail"? Why does everyone need to know about this service provider?

Had email been less popular in the first place, combined with the sensibility of modern tech product managers, we'd have a thousand product managers making small improvements to the product without affecting usage.

In the absence of adoption, these can all be considered UX issues:

• The younger generation doesn't care at all.
• The older generation knows what the "@" symbol is.

Many people learned how to send tokens to addresses starting with “0x..” when they thought they could make money trading crap on Binance.

I'm sure if there was a super fun crypto game that 13 to 17 year olds threw themselves into, almost everyone could solve these problems in a week.

summary

Cryptocurrencies do have user experience issues, but they don't.

If the technology is useful enough—for example, it's fun enough, or the financial incentive to use it is great enough—then UX problems aren't really UX problems.

What is considered the biggest UX hurdle isn't that big, in my opinion. Learning about blockchains, cross-chain bridges, and gas fees is not a huge effort for one generation if they are motivated to do so - and the rest will be forced to learn accordingly.

The deeper problem with cryptocurrency is not user experience, but that it is not useful enough.

This is admittedly, the nice thing about software like cryptocurrency is that it will only improve, likely to overcome the "generally useful" threshold at some point. The technology already exists in some small areas - such as international transfers via stablecoins.

Crypto winter does not affect the pace of progress. If you look at the most popular apps (ranked by TVL or whatever), notice how many of them were built with small budgets (Uniswap, Aave, etc.). As far as I know, there is no correlation between investor interest and progress.

My prediction is that if/when cryptocurrency achieves mainstream adoption, it will still have a lot of weird UX issues that would be considered harmful if organic adoption didn't hide them.

The issues listed above will be addressed, but I don't see them as real barriers to adoption. If every problem could be perfectly solved tomorrow, I don't think we will have so many users.

Solving the adoption problem is either fun or economics:

• A crypto-native game that attracts organic usage.
• A safe way to generate competitive dollar yields.

(The biggest caveat is key management, which is the most uncomfortable part, even for OG)