Crypto still has a lot to learn from traditional finance, and it all still comes down to trust. Even with user experience. Banks have spent years building platforms and applications that make things simple – they have security in place that people understand. Contrast this with crypto – even more heavily weighed down with regulatory scrutiny and stricter security measures. This is great for the industry (I am a proponent of better regulation) but, unfortunately, it’s not so great for the end user. As an industry, it’s hard not to feel like we’ve failed with UX. We have made everything so complex that people have a hard time understanding it, and that makes it hard to trust.
Admittedly, despite working on a crypto platform, I occasionally find this lack of understanding to be a blocker from my own experience in crypto. Every time I make a transaction to a wallet address, I’m thinking “did I just lose everything?” Most crypto apps just throw everything at you at once. Look at some of the larger crypto exchanges- – some even worth billions – they still can’t figure out how to make a product that doesn’t terrify new users. Despite their positioning as a consumer-focused crypto platform, you are presented with infinite possibilities all at once. It’s a feature overload. KYC muddled in with difficult terminology, and then the option to trade everything under the sun. It confuses not only people who are just starting out, but also some of the more seasoned players in the space (I like to include myself in the latter).
Time for the great unbundling
There’s a good reason why traditional finance, and fintech, is going through its unbundling era. For too long, feature overload and banking apps being the jack-of-all-trades was an ineffective way to attract and retain users. You can’t do everything well. And it’s working – we’re seeing more and more banks targeting specific user groups and performing specific functions. Just look at the likes of Mercury, who exclusively serve startups and tech companies, offering features specific to their needs like team access controls and API integrations.
I expect – well, hope – that crypto has this same unbundling moment. Each specific problem in crypto should have its own specific solution. At Ka.app, we tried this with our peer-to-peer transfers. While it was a pretty complex system happening internally on our platform, we removed all that complexity. Users can just send to users for free, and fast. We also looked at simple automations – like an easy swap engine. The key is to mirror the same type of user-friendly flows that banks already offer, like automatically saving to different accounts or investing into different funds.
The problem with transparency
There is, of course, a catch – crypto is all about transparency, right? So we find ourselves walking on a tightrope, trying to balance making things simple while not losing what makes crypto special.
The really annoying part is how crypto connects to the real world. Getting your crypto out and actually spending it is a pain. There’s quite a lot of parts to this – taxation is really confusing, and banks often create additional hurdles. They might block your account out of nowhere when you try to deposit funds, or reject transfers when you’re trying to withdraw. It’s just uncomfortable.
Sign-up flows in crypto are very similar to what banks have, especially with regulated products. But the KYC requirements are insane right now. Take a number of European countries for example – in some of these you need to do a Zoom call to complete KYC, doing this whole verification check and then a video call on top. That’s way more complex than what banking apps like Revolut ask for. We preach decentralization and accessibility, yet we’ve built more barriers to entry than traditional finance ever had.This is the true cost of transparency, and it’s the user who inevitably pays.
Change is necessary
I think we’re going to see big shifts as regulation comes in. With MiCA in the EU setting compliance standards, and similar frameworks likely in the US and other regions, the industry will have to adapt. More companies are already starting to focus on crypto newbies, but there’s a problem – we don’t really know what these new users want.
One of the main challenges is that most platforms are still built for people who live and breathe crypto. We need to start looking at different target groups, not just the pros. It’s about creating products that someone new can actually use – where they don’t have to worry about different currencies or networks. It should just work in the background, like your bank does.
The hard truth is that crypto won’t gain mainstream adoption by continuing to build platforms that only crypto natives can understand and trust – we’re essentially building products for ourselves while pretending they’re for everyone. While the technology behind crypto might be revolutionary, if we can’t make it as simple and trustworthy as traditional banking, we’ll never expand beyond our current user base. The industry needs to decide what’s more important: showing off all our technical capabilities, or building products that normal people actually trust enough to use – because right now, our obsession with complexity is killing crypto’s chance at mainstream adoption.