For the past 15 years, crypto has struggled to gain mainstream adoption because it’s difficult to use. The benefits of decentralized and uncensorable money are clear, but the janky user experience posed a very high bar to entry.
Working out how to use seed phrases and hardware wallets, the gut-churning unease felt in the 15 minutes it takes for a large amount of crypto to land in a 34-character address that may have been mistyped — the UX sucks for ordinary people.
And once you’ve figured out Ethereum or Bitcoin, there are a million other blockchains, each with its own unique rules and features, with no easy way to transfer assets or actions between them.
But 2025 is the year crypto finally becomes user-friendly.
The iPhone moment for crypto UX
Nemil Dalal, product lead of Coinbase Developers Platform, says the technology is improving so fast you’re “just not going to recognize crypto in like, two, three years’ time; it’s gonna be completely different.”
Nemil Dalal at the Every Agent Needs a Wallet event. (Fenton)
“It feels like we were building mainframes back in the day, and now it’s like our iPhone moment. All these dreams we had, [that] we tried for many years that just didn’t work, right now, suddenly are possible.”
Today, a single click can launch a complicated crosschain transaction that settles almost instantly. Users can log in to a crypto wallet or sign up for a service using just a fingerprint linked to a Gmail address. The new technology enables decentralized apps to feel like Coinbase and enable you to trade any coin or use any protocol on any chain.
The magic of intents, passkeys and chain abstraction means new users coming into crypto will have a totally different experience than in the past. All of the complexity is being abstracted away under the hood.
Abstraction as a concept in crypto UX
The big advances are often a form of abstraction — whether…
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