Das Internet geht nicht mehr weg, Web3

Consumer Product Moment

One reason centralized exchanges have flourished is because of the high access barriers today’s self-custodial solutions, wallets and hardware security devices, still have. We have seen where this approach has led us.

Self-custody software interfaces are still rudimentary, can be confusing and current hardware security devices are clunky, look like USB sticks (which can distort the perception and make it look like the owned assets are actually stored on the device, like a hard drive) and can be hard to set-up for regular people.

Security has to to be convenient, too. We need the self-custody experience and products to be better. In other words: We need to repackage crypto hardware, software and experience as consumer products. Over the last couple of days, we saw two important signals, which I want to point out: amanda0x‘s call for a better wallet software experience and the introduction of the e-ink Ledger Stax, co-developed with Tony Fadell.

Reimagining the experience around interacting with digital art, digital collectibles and cryptocurrency is essential to push blockchain-based technology to the next level. This growing realization in the community is an important first step.

I hope that three other essential experiences—on-ramp, discovery and display—are next. Centralized exchanges are still an important on-ramp channel; Instagram feeds and TikTok are still better discovery tools than a marketplace like OpenSea; and I still have not found a beautiful, quick way to display my NFTs especially in a smart phone environment.

A more consumer-friendly experience will be crucial to improve in order to onboard the next million users. Let’s do it.

This post was first published on my Mirror blog.

Standard