Crypto design challenges

A core part of all wallets is a way to list transactions. Too many wallets today treat this as a list of data without much thought about what it means for the user and within the context of trust.

In the coming years, hundreds of millions of people will interact with cryptocurrency on-ramps—exchanges and similar services where they can receive their first cryptocurrencies and other crypto assets. For most people, this will be with a centralized exchange (CEX). Exchanges will be most people's first time truly interacting with crypto. Exchange... See more

Web3 guidance & curation: This is the discovery phase for slightly more advanced users that are now asking "What can I do with my crypto?" There are opportunities to help people discover what exists, what is safe to use and guide people along the way. It's 1998 and people rely on AOL or the Yahoo! homepage to show them what's out there. What's the ... See more

One of the reasons I'm so excited about web3 is that everything so desparately needs design help that almost any attention to detail anywhere in any common flow would be tremendously valued. It's like getting in on the ground floor of helping define key interactions in browsers, email clients and other core tools during the formation of Internet.

Why should we put the onus on new users to know the difference between various blockchains/Layer 2s and know what their wallet can and can't support? It's already hard enough to explain how to safely backup a seed phrase. This lets the people use whatever web3 service they want with minimal overhead.

The next billion crypto users shouldn't have to pay to make crypto usable. They shouldn't have to deal with long addresses that could lead to huge issues like them losing funds. What's the Gmail of wallet addressing?

Demystify common actions like connecting a wallet and signing a message. After you've used a few dApps, it becomes very common to see a lot of different dialogs you need to accept or confirm. This makes it all too easy for someone to absent-mindedly get into a habit of accepting these without quite understanding what's happening.

Yea, that's all true. But what I'm talking about is one level up than the blockchain itself. I'm talking about the interfaces people interact with to do what they need to do, which may happen to be directly on or indirectly related to the blockchain. It's about elevating context and providing signals about their interactions so they can feel safer ... See more

With that, we'll have to be careful about introducing thoughtful abstraction—simplifying and hiding complexity without diluting the essence of web3 or taking away control when it might be valued.