The incorporation to Web3 is difficult. Even at the height of the bear market in November 2021, with wall-to-wall media coverage, polls said the space remained frustratingly impenetrable.

The Crypto Literacy report, published that month, found that only 33% of those surveyed felt that buying cryptocurrency was easy. The report also showed that 96% in the US and 99% in Mexico and Brazil failed their crypto literacy test. Clearly, we have a way to go.

Web3 is growing at the same rate as the beginnings of the Internet

Despite poor crypto literacy, there are encouraging signs when you look at the numbers. According to an analysis by a16z, there are currently between 7 and 50 million active Ethereum users. That compares closely to the level of adoption seen on the internet in 1995. (As the dominant smart contract platform, Ethereum serves as a good metric, though it’s not perfect.)

If the trend continues, that still leaves us in the early stages of adoption. Two Web2 giants, YouTube and Facebook, weren’t established until a decade later. However, in 1995, the vast majority of consumers were wary of online shopping. Entering your card details into a web browser was not as common as it is today. In the author’s experience, it wasn’t until the late 2000s that people in their 50s and 60s became regular users of e-commerce.

Can we wait another ten years before cryptocurrency adoption takes off? Complicated user interfaces (UI) and user experience (UX) suggest so. Unlike the 1995 Internet, however, the Web3 version of the Internet is noticeably more complex. It also has a dense subculture that can be difficult for outsiders to understand and penetrate.

Three Barriers to Adoption

According to Drew Tozer, Shipyard Software’s lead designer and marketing coordinator, the three biggest barriers to mass adoption are complexity, language, and desire. “There is an internal culture within this space that makes complexity attractive to builders and designers; It makes community members feel empowered to be part of a small group that understands these issues. It is this mindset that will always hold back mass adoption.”

Another stumbling block, he tells me, is that native Web3 products aren’t intuitive enough. Currently, they lack universal terminology and clear steps to follow. “By using semiotics to help people link what they already know about their world to these new concepts, we can begin to invite anyone to participate.”

For Tozer, perhaps the most crucial hurdle is that, for most people, Web3 doesn’t address the immediate needs of most people. “There cannot and should not be mass adoption of financial instruments while our neighbors are impoverished, hungry and subject to conflict,” she says.

Another fundamental problem, according to Tozer, is that the design team, which designs the user interface, arrives too late. The foundation of most UX in Web3 is the smart contract that underpins it. Once the contract is audited, it is very difficult to change it. “The design team can make the product look beautiful and include helpful tooltips and descriptions that build the logic around correct usage. But the usage is set in stone. If there is an obvious problem with the UX, the design team can only act retroactively to try to explain how to fix it.”

DeFi is the biggest culprit for complex user experience

The FTX collapse and broader skepticism about centralized exchanges have put the spotlight on DeFi. Not only has it helped emphasize its decentralized nature, but the loss of billions in client funds has also helped sell its transparency, security, and bona fide trustlessness.

However, DeFi is still complicated. Show any uninitiated “normal” around your average protocol, and they’re likely to be left scratching their heads. Even experienced cryptocurrency traders can take a while to understand the pros and cons of a project. Too many protocols still rely on pre-existing familiarity with the ecosystem. For DeFi to compete, you need to make it easy to interact with it.

Ravrinda Kumar, the founder of Frontier, a non-custodial wallet that works on more than 35 blockchains, is one such critic. Unlike DeFi, centralized exchanges like Coinbase and FTX were simple, allowing more users to join, he says. “That’s the trade-off you have to make when you use these centralized services: You have less control over your funds and data, but they’re easier to use.”

He himself admits that the industry needs to focus more on UX. “Now that centralized exchanges are failing in terms of security, it is time for non-custodial wallets like Frontier to look to simplify the experience while maintaining the security of self-custody.”

Last year, a report by Morning Consult found DeFi awareness deceptively low. Less than a third of ordinary Americans had heard of DeFi, compared to 77% of cryptocurrency owners. The optimistic view is that there is a lot of potential for growth. A less sunny outlook would see an industry failing to make its case. Both are undoubtedly true.

Better UI comes before adoption

Waiting for further adoption of Web3, be it DeFi, NFT, or crypto, before innovating, UI is putting the cart before the horse. You cannot achieve one without the other. “The user interface is not, shall we say, the most intuitive,” continues Kumar. Among other adjectives, he describes it as “fragmented.”

“You have to use different wallets for each chain. DeFi can be really hard to understand because of the phrase or key management involved. But I also believe that it will eventually be resolved.” Frontier, he says, is working on a multi-party computing (MPC) wallet that combines security with simplicity. MPC wallets are more difficult to mine because it requires mining multiple parties at once. Kumar tells me that it will also eliminate the need for seed phrases/keys when starting up.

“Yes, there is more education and simplification to work on overall, but when these solutions innovate on the simplicity front, adoption will accelerate.”