Crypto’s UX crisis: Billions of people still aren’t onboard | Opinion

We are losing. For all the talk of 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 outside our 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 practically impossible for them to join. We speak of empowerment and freedom, but deliver friction and exclusivity.

Crypto has become a mirror, endlessly reflecting its own obsessions. Layer-2s multiply, chains fork, and tokenomics evolve, but still, the average person finds crypto terrifying, obscure, or just plain unusable. While the world is starving for better financial tools—faster remittances, stable savings, cross-border payments—we’re building puzzles for ourselves. If we don’t wake up and build for humans, not just for tech engineers, hackers, and developers, we risk becoming the QWERTY Blackberry of finance: brilliant, principled, and utterly irrelevant.

Crypto might very well repeat QWERTY smartphones’ fate of obscurity if we don’t adapt to simplified UX. Imagine a new user trying to onboard into the crypto space for the first time. A user might need to download a wallet, custodial vs. noncustodial, understand the difference between L1s and L2s, how to ridge assets (likely losing time and money in the process), then pay (unpredictable) gas fees in native tokens they may not own yet, figure out why a transaction failed, what is Etherscan 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’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of web3. On one hand, it claims to democratize finance and empower the individual. On the other hand, it expects that same individual to understand seed phrases, slippage tolerance, RPC endpoints, gas fees, and multi-sig governance.

Mass adoption is not happening

The research estimates that around 5% of the global population owns cryptocurrencies. And for them, crypto’s promise to redefine money, ownership, and trust has been fulfilled. But most of those owners are developers, tech enthusiasts, and early adopters. But over a decade into its existence, let’s face the uncomfortable truth: crypto has failed to onboard ordinary people.

Mass adoption has been promised dozens of times, from the boom in 2017 to DeFi summer 2020, from memcoins to AI agents and artificial intelligence in general, from stablecoins to compliance and regulation, yet 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 times when TikTok is consciously ruling the world. The average attention time span of current users on the internet is between 7 and 15 seconds. Data 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 am talking about regular apps with intuitive navigation and usability. Crypto apps often present you with a blank wallet and no clear next step. You’re on your own, go and find out how to fund, to secure, to understand what you’ve just signed.

This gap is a strategic failure. Because in consumer technology, the product with the better user experience usually wins, not the one with the most ideology. Meanwhile, global demand for accessible financial tools is surging. In many parts of the world, inflation is eating away at savings, and remittance fees are still abusive. Even the ‘safe haven’ of global finance, the U.S. dollar, shows the worst results since 1973, dropping over 10% in value. Crypto could offer a lifeline. But that lifeline is tangled in jargon and incompatible wallets.

Web3 prides itself on sovereignty: users control their keys, their data, and their destiny. But sovereignty without usability becomes a kind of tyranny. Expecting ordinary users to take on the full burden of security and understanding — with zero margin for error — is not empowerment. 

Compare this to the experience of using Apple Pay, Venmo, Revolut, or any other web2 counterpart. The interfaces are clean, the onboarding takes seconds, and the 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 won’t get a second chance at mass adoption. The next billion users won’t arrive because the tech gets more powerful or the token prices go higher. They’ll come when the products are simpler, faster, and safer. And obviously better than what they already have.

The irony is that crypto has the infrastructure to deliver extraordinary financial freedom. But without a radical shift toward user-first thinking, that freedom will remain locked behind interfaces only early adopters can understand. In the end, it’s not the code or the consensus mechanism that decides adoption. It’s user experience.

Designing for simplicity in web3

Simplifying UX in crypto isn’t about removing complexity by sacrificing key features of decentralized finance, and it’s about managing it wisely. Ultimately, the platform that wins this race won’t be the one with the best tokenomics or deepest protocol integrations. It will be the one that makes crypto feel effortless without asking users to leave behind control or security.

Crypto is flooded with innovation. But most of those innovations are horizontal: new chains, new L2s, new tokens, new DeFi protocols, etc., not vertical, meaning deeper integration with human needs. This points to a deeper issue: crypto builders often build for each other, not for the people they claim to serve. The design language, developer-centric documentation, and fragmented UI flows reinforce the sense that crypto isn’t a product, it’s a puzzle.

There are billions of users ready for empowerment by decentralized finance; let’s make crypto ready for them.