The next billion crypto users won’t care about blockchain

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

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

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People aren’t going to do that, and they’re not going to use blockchain, because they’re suddenly convinced that decentralization is the death knell. But give them a really good app that happens to be built on the blockchain, make sure it’s intuitive to use, and suddenly they’re hooked.

Blockchain must go!

Unfortunately, very few people in the crypto industry attempt to build such an app. Instead, they are barking up the wrong tree with their beliefs 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 become a success.

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

If the crypto industry ever wants to convince the next billion users to get started with blockchain, it must focus on abstraction, not education or decentralization. The goal should be to make blockchain ‘disappear’, just as the TCP/IP protocol that forms the basis for the functioning of the Internet is invisible to 99% of users. By removing the technical knowledge and jargon of blockchain, we can make web3 applications as useful and easy to use as traditional smartphone apps. Do that, and there will be greater acceptance.

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

A lot can be done to make blockchain disappear. Right now, people are put off by many of its quirks, like seed phrases, private keys (what’s the difference?!), the long random wallet addresses, gas fees, bridging, liquidity and the like. Abstraction means that these things disappear, allowing users to interact with crypto and web3 in the same way they interact 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. For starters, creating a wallet should be as easy as entering an email address and password, and users should be given a foolproof way to recover that password in case they forget it. If everyone has to write down an opening sentence and hide it, it’s just not going to work.

Then we can do away with the multitude of wallets we need to communicate with different networks. What we want is one wallet that merges all our funds in one place, so we can send and receive money from any other wallet. The technical part, using cross-chain bridges to send money across different networks, signing approvals, making sure you have enough money to pay the gas costs – all that needs to go away 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 as long as they work. Liquidity is another thing that needs to go, but we also need more of it so that users can exchange tokens without delay. Make sure it’s there so transactions work, but don’t worry about the details. Gas rates should also be simpler. Let people pay with any token so they don’t have to ‘hold’ Ethereum (ETH) just 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 at all. You open the app and it works intuitively, and that’s what gets people hooked.

Abstraction must become the holy grail of blockchain. We need to remove all the complexity and problems so that people can actually see what web3 has to offer. It’s past time that we made this happen. The Internet only started to take shape in the 1980s, but by 2001 more than 55% of Americans were already online; mainstream adoption was achieved in no time.

Meanwhile, crypto is already well into its second decade, and it’s not nearly as popular as the internet was at the same age. Much 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, with the internet already running on autopilot by then.

Blockchain must disappear, so that the user only sees useful, entertaining and addictive applications that add value to their lives. Crypto needs to stop focusing on the ideological debates and intricacies of layer 2 networks and debating which one is best. Nobody cares. All they want to see is a seamless application that actually works, instead of trying to figure out how it works.

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