One of web3’s biggest challenges today is designing for people who don’t already speak its language, so I was excited to sit down with Luke Youngblood to explore what it takes to build systems that reach beyond the crypto bubble. From AWS to Coinbase and now leading Moonwell, Luke brings deep infrastructure expertise and a sharp focus on making blockchain easier, safer, and more accessible. One of web3’s biggest challenges today is designing for people who don’t already speak its language, so I was excited to sit down with Luke Youngblood to explore what it takes to build systems that reach beyond the crypto bubble. From AWS to Coinbase and now leading Moonwell, Luke brings deep infrastructure expertise and a sharp focus on making blockchain easier, safer, and more accessible. One of web3’s biggest challenges today is designing for people who don’t already speak its language, so I was excited to sit down with Luke Youngblood to explore what it takes to build systems that reach beyond the crypto bubble. From AWS to Coinbase and now leading Moonwell, Luke brings deep infrastructure expertise and a sharp focus on making blockchain easier, safer, and more accessible. Luke Youngblood Luke Youngblood Moonwell Moonwell How has accessibility in web3 evolved over the years, and what is the next frontier? In the early days of crypto, most people accessed it from a desktop computer on a fast internet connection. If you were early to Bitcoin or Ethereum, you were probably a developer like me—or a gamer—using it on your gaming PC. Either way, at that time, you needed some serious hardware and bandwidth just to run a wallet or interact with DeFi apps. In the last few years, decentralized finance (DeFi) apps have become usable on mobile web. That brought us a step closer to real accessibility; today, you can use most apps on chains like Ethereum or Base directly from your phone in a browser like Safari or Chrome. The next step, and one we’re already starting to see, is the use of native mobile apps. Zora, for example, now has an iOS app on Base. It’s a social and creative platform, and moving to native mobile is a big leap. That’s likely the direction we’ll take with Moonwell, too: building a great native experience on both iOS and Android. Zora Zora Of course, there are still other barriers to adoption—and language is a big one. Most early crypto apps simply assumed users spoke English. That might work in parts of the Americas or Europe, but it doesn’t hold in much of Latin America, Africa, or Asia, where English often isn’t the primary language. That’s why we’ve translated Moonwell into four additional languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese. We have to keep making web3 more accessible, not just in terms of devices and apps, but in terms of language and context, too. Reaching beyond the small percentage of people who speak English as a second language is key to global adoption. Your Twitter bio says, “Building an open financial system.” Where are we with that right now, and what stands in the way? At the core of an open financial system is self-custody. People should be able to own and control their assets directly—without relying on a third party. That’s always been important to early crypto users like me: being able to hold your own tokens and actually use them. The fundamentals are simple: freedom to custody and freedom to transact. What’s not simple, though, is onboarding the next billion in a way that makes those freedoms real. First come, wallets. If you’ve ever installed one, you know how painful it can be. App store, endless options, weird UX, seed phrase anxiety… For someone new to crypto, it’s a maze. That whole flow needs to go. We think passkey wallets are the answer; they’re built into most phones, secured by biometrics like Face ID, and don’t require downloading anything or managing a seed phrase. Telling someone to store twelve or twenty-four recovery words in a drawer and hope they never lose them really isn’t the way. Passkeys solve this, too. They back up automatically to iCloud or Google Cloud, so if you lose your phone, you can recover your wallet without panic or paperwork. Most people don’t use password managers—another problem—but at least modern browsers and OSs are making that easier. Still, access to the latest hardware isn’t universal. That’s a gap we can’t ignore. And then there’s transaction fees. Most onchain apps still expect users to buy ETH just to make a transaction, which adds unnecessary friction. At Moonwell, we solve this with Paymasters and sponsored transactions. First-time users can create a passkey wallet, enable cloud backup, and start using the app without ever buying ETH or worrying about fees. On Base, we use credits from Coinbase’s Gasless campaign to cover costs; on other networks, we sponsor transactions with USDC. The cost is low—just twenty dollars can cover thousands of transactions, making it easier for users to get started and for developers to scale. This way, we can onboard people without having to ask them to pay just to try an app—and it changes everything! Think about web2 apps like Instagram. It just works, it’s free. You never think about paying to post a photo. DeFi needs to feel that simple, too, if we want people to actually use it. What’s an engineering or product decision you’ve made at Moonwell that felt particularly impactful? One of the things I’ve noticed—after using the internet for decades since I was a kid—is how much it has evolved when it comes to networks. Back in the early days, if you wanted to connect with someone online, you had to think about which network you were on. I remember using university networks and dial-up bulletin board systems. You couldn’t just go anywhere; you had to log into a specific system to reach specific people. Everything was its own little walled garden. And honestly, that’s how crypto feels today. Ethereum, Base, other layer 1s, and layer 2s—there are bridges between them, but using apps across chains is still a hassle. If your wallet is connected to one network, you can’t easily interact with an app on another. You always have to think about where your tokens are and how to move them. So at Moonwell, we’ve been trying to solve this. We built a feature called Beam, already live in its early version, to make cross-chain UX feel like single-chain UX. Beam shows your total balance across chains—if you’ve got $50 on one chain, $25 on another, and $25 elsewhere, we just show you $100. When you hit “deposit” and sign the transaction, Beam gathers your tokens, bridges them if needed, and deposits them—all behind the scenes. To do that, we use a modular execution environment that picks the fastest and most cost-effective route. In many cases, that’s Across Protocol, which is great for bridging efficiently. The user stays in control the whole time—they’re still signing the transaction—but the complexity is abstracted away. It’s both faster and cheaper. Even when bridging from Ethereum mainnet, the process takes just a few minutes. We bundle transactions using an intents-based system, so your share of the gas might only be a penny or two. It's not like those big onchain operations that cost $15 or more. Under the hood, it's complex, but to the user, it feels simple and seamless. What do you think the web3 space still gets wrong about UX? Too much of web3 expects users to think about the underlying infrastructure. What chain they are on, how to bridge assets, or whether an app is even compatible with their wallet. That’s not a good user experience—it’s just extra friction. The “Switch Network” prompt you see in many wallets is a great example. It’s really one of the clearest signs we haven’t abstracted the complexity away. If you look at messaging, be it via SMS or WhatsApp, you send a text, and it delivers. You’re not wondering what carrier the other person uses—it’s invisible to you. That’s what people expect from software. Web3 should be no different. Users shouldn’t be blocked from an app just because it runs on a different chain. With Beam, we’re pushing infrastructure into the background, where it belongs. My hope is that in a few years, no one will care whether they’re on Ethereum, Solana, Base, or BNB Chain. They’ll just open the app—whether it’s Moonwell, a game on Sonium, or something on World Chain—and it’ll just work. What can projects do to build a stronger user-focused culture? Before I went full-time into crypto, I worked in web2 tech—at Amazon Web Services (AWS). And in many ways, the adoption of cloud services mirrors what’s happening now with web3. In the early days, most companies didn’t take the cloud seriously. If you worked in tech back then, you were probably dealing with massive data centers and centralized systems like Oracle. When AWS launched EC2—the Elastic Compute Cloud—in the 2000s, big enterprises saw it as a toy. Something for startups or hobbyists, not real infrastructure. But now, most of the largest businesses in the world use cloud as their default. It’s faster, cheaper, and more flexible because you only pay for what you use. That’s very similar to what’s happening with web3 and financial apps today. Legacy banking infrastructure often takes days to settle transactions, while web3 enables instant cross-border settlements. We’re upgrading the financial system much like engineers upgraded from on-prem data centers to cloud services in the 2010s. By adopting new financial infrastructure—smart contracts and web3—banks, fintechs, and traditional finance companies will be able to offer far better services. Much of this will be powered by protocols like Moonwell, because we’ve spent years building decentralized infrastructure that’s self-custodial, permissionless, and gives people real control over their money. The GENIUS Act recently passed the U.S. Senate, marking the first step toward allowing banks to hold stablecoins on their balance sheets. It still needs to pass the House and be signed by the President, but if it does, the “crypto economy” may soon just be “the economy. GENIUS Act Big banks—like Bank of America, Santander in Latin America, and Brazil’s BTG Pactual—will want to integrate stablecoin infrastructure into their core products. That means instant cross-border settlements and cheaper remittances, which is a big deal for people in places like Colombia who currently wait days and pay high fees to services like MoneyGram to receive money from abroad. It’s exciting to see the traditional finance system upgrading to support onchain finance and stablecoins, just like the cloud transformed data centers and opened up new possibilities for services that didn’t exist before. As crypto becomes more institutional, how can we maintain its core values and avoid just “repainting” traditional fintech with blockchain? That’s a tough question. Large traditional finance players will always want to centralize control because they want to protect their existing business models. Decentralization threatens that, so there’s a natural tension. Some of these centralized players will build private networks. For example, BlackRock has its BUIDL Fund on Ethereum and Base. It’s a tokenized fund that lets people invest in traditional financial assets. The fund is an ERC-20 token, but it’s permissioned—only licensed broker-dealers, ATS (Alternative Trading Systems), and other regulated market participants can hold it. So, there will be centralized assets—like tokenized stocks—that you can only interact with if you’re a bank, brokerage, or have passed KYB (Know Your Business) checks. However, I think decentralization and permissionless self-custody can still exist through intermediaries. For instance, if the BlackRock BUIDL Fund is only available to institutions, retail investors like me can’t buy it directly. But a bank or fintech could become a licensed participant, join the fund as an institution, and then offer retail banking services to customers like me. They’d do KYC on me, and then I could buy and transact with a wrapped version of the fund. But that’s just an example; you can imagine similar things for tokenized stocks—it would mean only US investors can hold them if they’ve completed KYC through a bank. This setup would look somewhat like the current financial system, but with benefits like instant settlement—you wouldn’t have to wait two days for stock certificates to clear. It’s much more efficient. A concrete example is loan origination. Instead of waiting days or weeks for human loan officers to review credit and approve loans, decentralized apps like Moonwell can originate thousands of loans in a single day automatically using smart contracts. So, as traditional finance adopts web3 tech, you’ll see huge efficiency gains. But ultimately, retail users will still be able to take the self-custodial route. I might buy a fraction of Nvidia stock and hold it in my own wallet—not through BlackRock or a big bank, but via something like E*TRADE or a retail-focused platform offering a faster, cheaper experience powered by blockchain. What’s your advice to builders looking to build trust with non-crypto-native users? Put yourself in the user’s shoes. When I build onchain apps, I think of it like a Hippocratic oath. For doctors, that means avoiding harm to the patient. For us, it means protecting the user and their funds, no matter what. Of course, crypto has its share of hacks, so as builders, we must never release anything that isn’t audited, secure, and backed by a solid bug bounty. Malicious actors will always try to steal from your users, so protecting user funds has to be a top priority. The other piece is decentralization. Early on, it’s tempting to keep control centralized—you can move faster. But if your app grows to millions in value, you don’t want all control in one place or one person’s hands. It puts your team and users at risk, making you a target. It’s important to think early about moving control to a DAO or decentralized governance by token holders, and to distribute those tokens widely. Moonwell has over 100,000 WELL token holders who govern the protocol. That setup lets us upgrade contracts and add markets safely without centralized control. It builds resilience and helps us sleep better at night. And what’s your call to action for people curious about onchain finance? Start by exploring. Moonwell’s a good place to learn how lending and borrowing work onchain. And if you’ve got questions along the way, Mamo’s there too—it’s a cute little AI companion we built to help people get more comfortable with the basics. Moonwell Moonwell Mamo Mamo The jump from curious to confident takes time, so start small and stay curious!
