It has been over a decade since Satoshi Nakamoto introduced BTC and the world’s first working blockchain. Following the success of Bitcoin, hundreds of new blockchains emerged, each trying to be a better variant of the other.

While the blockchain industry has morphed into a multi-billion dollar ecosystem in recent years, the widespread adoption of decentralized finance (DeFi), Web3, and the metaverse are still far from reaching their potential in any meaningful way.

The main reason behind this slow growth is the prevailing focus of most blockchains and projects built on top of them on technicalities and less on user experience (UX).

The user experience is crucial to the widespread adoption of a product or technology. It’s not just about the product or technology itself, but also about how it feels to use it. The user experience contributes significantly to the success of any new product, service, or technology, and it will be no different for blockchain.

UX has been integral to facilitating interactions across devices, apps, and websites for years. The more intuitive and responsive the UX, the more likely it is to experience widespread use. UX is the reason why thousands of products and services dominate the Web2 ecosystem.

That being said, when it comes to blockchain technology, existing DeFi and Web3 ecosystems have a long list of shortcomings in the UX area, including but not limited to poor writing, minimal onboarding workflows, lack of user guides, and unnecessarily complicated interfaces and users. flowing

The UX dilemma of Web3 and DeFi

The DeFi ecosystem is among the largest sectors of the blockchain ecosystem, yet only a handful of people use it regularly. That’s because DeFi and Web3 need to improve their attention towards usability.

The UX problem is not limited to frontend (consumer-facing) interfaces; it also affects the elements of the backend aspect (facing the developer). Because today’s Web3 and DeFi developers don’t have the necessary tools and infrastructure to allow them to easily, quickly, and safely express their ideas, this affects the bottom line.

Legacy blockchain technology is not designed for interoperability, resulting in a dispersed industry. Savvy developers and entrepreneurs are fighting on-chain challenges that other disparate chains may have already solved. This siled approach increases the workload for developers.

To mitigate this challenging reality, the blockchain industry needs an end-to-end technology stack designed and built together that offers a standard that works for everyone. Only then will the blockchain ecosystem offer the necessary tools, infrastructure and UX for mainstream technological acceptance.

For example, before Tesla broke records, most consumers balked at the idea of ​​electric cars in an era when standard gas-powered cars were the most important. The company began by emphasizing an electric car that was both practical and desirable. To achieve this result, Tesla optimized the UX of its cars and created complementary technology, products and services to help Tesla cars achieve broader acceptance.

A possible solution in the works

The blockchain community should learn from Tesla’s example. Instead of creating siled products and services, you need an infrastructure designed to work together seamlessly. Take Radix, which offers an intuitive interface and infrastructure for developers along with user experience optimizations for consumers across its wide range of products and services.

Radix CEO Piers Ridyard notes: “To truly achieve our vision of making DeFi and Web3 mainstream, we realized the entire stack—consensus, execution, programming, and user experience—had to be built together.” .
“To truly achieve our vision of making DeFi and Web3 mainstream, we realized that the entire stack—consensus, execution, programming, and user experience—had to be built together.”

To understand how Radix addresses this UX dilemma, it’s vital to recognize where existing smart contract platforms fall short. Developers generally rely on four things about the underlying blockchain to create high-value products and services: ease of use, reusability, security, and compatibility.

Ease of use needs to be improved on existing infrastructure because it requires years of experience in specific smart contract language (code) to build functional protocols and decentralized applications (dApps). Then there is the security issue with smart contract platforms because most platforms force developers to implement core asset functionality and asset authorization without proper security measures.

Reusability and composability are other lagging areas, mainly because existing smart contract solutions are designed to work in standalone environments. In this case, a developer on a different network cannot reuse code developed by another developer on another network, which increases build and deployment time.

To address these issues, Radix offers a multi-stack solution, including a consensus algorithm called Cerberus, designed to allow unlimited scalability without breaking atomic composability. Following Cerberus, Radix has also developed several other consensus algorithms like Tempo to serve different use cases.

Next, Radix has developed the Radix Engine, which provides developers with highly intuitive and easy-to-use models for dApps and protocols, eliminating redundant work for developers. Finally, the platform features a dedicated programming language called Scrypto, designed specifically for Web3 and DeFi developers.

While these fixes are aimed at solving user experience issues developers are facing, the Radix team is simultaneously working to optimize the end user experience. For example, Radix has reinvented the concept of digital wallets with the Radix Wallet. Because the Radix infrastructure is well-equipped with all features and functionality, Radix Wallet operates similar to a typical banking application that users have already experienced.

Users can choose custom logins through a feature called Radix Connect, connecting a single login to multiple wallets and accounts and tracking all assets from a single interface. The wallet can be accessed from mobile devices, desktop computers, dedicated apps, and browser extensions. Furthermore, it supports connectivity with a wide variety of dApps and protocols. Importantly, the wallet is self-custody, which means that users control everything.

At their core, DeFi and Web3 should be simple, straightforward, and intuitive. The user experience should be designed not to inhibit functionality, but to help users interact with technology effortlessly and at their own pace. The combination of Cerberus’ Radix, Radix Engine, Scrypto, and Radix Wallet work together to address the UX dilemma for developers and users.