UX and Adoption

The gap

Sending money through a banking app takes seconds and forgives mistakes. Doing the same on-chain can mean installing a wallet, writing down twelve words, funding it for fees, pasting a forty-character address, and accepting that an error is permanent.

Adoption depends less on the cryptography than on closing that gap.

What makes it hard

Irreversibility. No chargebacks, no support line. A wrong address means the money is gone. Every other consumer payment system has an undo; this one does not.

Key management. Ordinary software lets you reset a password. Here, the seed phrase is the account. Lose it and there is no recovery; leak it and there is no revocation.

Fees. Users must hold a separate token to pay network fees, in amounts that fluctuate with congestion, and understand why a transaction is stuck.

Addresses. Long strings of characters with no meaning, verified by comparing a few characters at each end and hoping.

What is improving

Account abstraction lets wallets behave more like normal accounts: social recovery, spending limits, someone else sponsoring the fee.

Human-readable names replace addresses with something a person can check.

Embedded wallets create the wallet silently behind a familiar login, so a newcomer is not handed a seed phrase in the first thirty seconds.

The trade-off

Every one of these reintroduces some dependency on a third party. That is the central tension: self-custody means no safety net, and safety nets mean someone else holds a rope.

Where each product should sit on that line is a real design decision, and a recurring argument at our meetups.