The Real Culprit Behind Web3’s Usability Problem

The number of investors in the crypto market doubled over the past year. While the ecosystem is slowly recuperating from the recent market crash and the current global crypto market cap is valued at slightly over $1 trillion, it’s clear the industry is only in its infancy and constantly evolving.

Crypto projects attracting new investors to the ecosystem translate into more capital and, as a result, growth. Still, blockchain technology currently limits developers in attempting to empower crypto users with better opportunities than the ones traditional financial institutions offer.

While the crypto world sanctifies decentralization and aims to give people control over their own assets, it lacks simple executable functions that make centralized finance more forthcoming, hindering the mass adoption of blockchain-based technology.

A Spoke in the Wheel

If the idea behind DeFi is to empower retail investors to do things they can’t at traditional financial institutions, why is it still easier for them to perform basic financial functions at a bank than through DeFi services?

When you walk into a CitiBank in New York—or, more realistically, pull up the app on your phone—you can access credit cards, loans, stocks, mortgages, and more seamlessly. Meanwhile, performing similar actions on Web3 requires performing a KYC at a centralized exchange, purchasing Ether, BNB, or whichever token you plan to use on a DEX, and then transferring it to your MetaMask just to be able to purchase the token you need for whichever DeFi service you’re after.

Even putting aside the absurdity of requiring to purchase the currency of a decentralized entity through a centralized one, this complexity required to even perform basic actions prevents developers and entrepreneurs from building Web3 into what it’s meant to be: The future of the internet.

To get there, we’re going to need to start by making the financial corners of Web3 look like Web3, rather than a different version of Web2. Allowing users to trade in assets on their own terms with an intuitive design that makes it simple for users to set up multiple conditional transactions can be a step in the right direction, but the problem runs even deeper than that. The current state of smart contract-based innovation in the DeFi space is the real issue that needs to be addressed, and the sooner the better.

The Underlying Technology

It is frustrating to know that technology is holding us back. Lines of code written on the blockchain, no matter how simple, requires deploying a smart contract. Developing a blockchain app is expensive. Coding for a smart contract is an entirely different beast than coding other programs. It follows a steep learning curve, involving learning high-level programming languages Solidity or Vyper, and the supply of smart contract developers is scarce, leaving Web3 innovation in the hands of a scarce minority.

All those issues with smart contracts and we still haven’t touched the most important obstacle that comes with the current state of blockchain: security. More than $1 billion was stolen from bridges so far in 2022, Elliptic reported in its mid-year analysis, showing just how volatile the technology is.

While the number of people who can tackle these issues blockchain poses remain low, we must find ways to work around it, for now. Adding more no-code capabilities in smart contracts will benefit both the investors and the developers, as users will be able to make more choices with their assets, giving developers more time to work on the backend issues that trouble us all.

The bear market is a perfect time to build, preferably creating opportunities for users to make their own choices with their digital assets, in more simple designs by getting around the limiting aspects of smart contracts in their current state. At the same time, developers rush to find a way to get around how limiting smart contracts really are.