Does the Web3 Industry Truly Want to Achieve Mass Adoption?

Web3 enthusiasts and stakeholders love to talk about “onboarding the next one billion users or mass adoption”, but beyond this vision lies an underlying issue that most innovators have continued to overlook – user experience (UX). Why do most of the Web3 products that exist feel so complex to use? If innovators in this nascent industry are really serious about achieving mainstream adoption, crypto has to be as simple to use as Web2 products such as bank apps and social media platforms.

The UX Puzzle in Web3 Products

For crypto natives, connecting a non-custodial wallet like Metamask with different chains may seem like a seamless task, but this ‘simple process’ can be very confusing for newbies. The typical onboarding process looks like this:

• Download a wallet or browser extension.
• Write down a 12-word seed phrase (and somehow not lose it).
• Switch between chains.
• Add obscure tokens manually.
• Figure out why gas fees just cost more than what you're trying to buy.

Compare this to the onboarding process of Web2 financial services; in most cases, all that is required for one to start using a particular bank app once they’ve registered an account is an email, password and some form of 2FA if the user sees fit.

Even better, all it takes to send money via traditional methods such as banks or fintechs apps are the details of the receiver. The sender doesn’t have to worry about the backend or which type of financial infra facilitates the transfer as long as the money is transferred in good time. In fact, there are some advanced use cases such as Kenya’s popular M-PESA service where anyone with a simple phone can send or receive funds and immediately be notified through text.

In Web3, that’s far from the case. While this nascent technology has revolutionized the speed at which funds can be moved across the world, the process is not UX-friendly. For starters, users have to copy an alphanumeric character string which makes up the crypto wallet, one single mistake and the money is irretrievably lost into a wrong wallet. To make it more complicated, most of the on-chain wallets require users to sign (approve) more than once, with all instances applying an on-chain fee.

Yes, Web3 systems are definitely cheaper and faster, but not designed for the average consumer in their current state.

What Mainstream Adoption Actually Takes

According to the concept of Technological Adoption Lifecycle, users are broken down into five categories; innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Web3, with only 18 million daily active users as per the latest stats, has managed to capture the first two categories – innovators and early adopters.

These are the individuals or entities that are willing to explore and take risks around this new area of innovation. Most of them can read through whitepapers to understand how complex tools such as decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and liquidity pools work. But what about the remaining 95% who are yet to be onboarded into Web3 as a result of the technical and UX hurdles?

The early majority, late majority and laggards are probably not interested in the details of the Web3 tech; however, a good percentage would be interested in using crypto products on a daily basis if the UX was not so complicated.

The Builders Doing it Right

On the brighter side, there are a handful of Web3 companies that seem to understand what the average crypto user is looking for. One good example is XBO.com exchange which won the prestigious "Best Digital Assets Exchange - Retail" award at the 2024 Global Digital Assets Awards that was organized by The Digital Banker. This crypto exchange offers a seamless onboarding experience for retail users with only an email and password required for one to get started.

More importantly, XBO.com has designed its Web3 products in an intuitive manner, starting with the website which is easy to navigate. Other notable offerings such as buying crypto or spot trading have also been designed with the user in mind. Instead of the complex Web3 structuring, XBO’s products go a notch higher to cater for newbies; this has seen the exchange accomplish several milestones like onboarding over 250k while the native token is still in the presale stage.

We also have more established brands like Binance which touts over 250 million users across the globe. This Web3 giant has mastered the art of making crypto simple to use; for example, the exchange allows its users to send funds to each other without having to copy alphanumeric characters. Instead, one can use a phone number, email or the Binance ID to send crypto assets internally. This is not only cheaper but more straightforward and resonates with the typical Web2 experience.

Another interesting Web3 product that falls in this category is the Phantom wallet. With the Solana ecosystem heating up over the past year, this non-custodial wallet has stood out as one of the DApps driving volumes on Solana. The project recently raised $150 million in a Series C funding round while the number of monthly active users crossed 15 million.

Conclusion

With only 560 million crypto owners across the world, the Web3 industry is far from achieving the much-coveted mass adoption milestone. Innovators need to take a more user-friendly approach now that a majority of the early adopters have already been onboarded. The focus should be towards solving problems for the average user in a way that they don’t have to stress about what happens in the backend of things, but whether their goal has been fulfilled in a simple manner.