A look at some key design challenges in crypto and Web3, from onboarding to wallet security, that need to be addressed for the next generation of users
It's still early days in crypto. — That's what you'll hear everywhere when you start digging into crypto and web3 today. Tweets: @ourielohayon , @developer_dao , @alexisohanian , @bx , @stammy , @alexcornell , @integralhq , and @jasonmarder Tweets: Ouriel / @ourielohayon : @Stammy yup. the wallet = web 3 passport https://twitter.com/... @developer_dao : Crypto design challenges by @developer_dao member @Stammy ◽️ It's still early days in crypto That's what you'll hear everywhere when you start digging into crypto & web3 today. For most new users this unfortunately feels a bit closer to the wild west ▽ https://paulstamatiou.com/... @alexisohanian : As more and more of the best Web2 UI/UX minds are focusing on Web3... Buckle up https://twitter.com/... Boaz Avital / @bx : @Stammy Very good writeup. We think a lot about all these topics as well - abstractions, naming, privacy, & esp trust. Designing crypto for institutions is uniquely interesting bc our users have a job to do vs exploring the space, high usability expectations, and are often not experts. Paul Stamatiou / @stammy : We're just getting started in crypto—this is just a slice of the design challenges we face. Imagine being the designer or engineer that creates the new, standard way to do something in web3. The impact is huge. It's 1998 and we don't even have AOL yet. LFG Alex Cornell / @alexcornell : @Stammy “Today “Connect with wallet” is very convenient but very dumb.” So true. Integral Protocol / @integralhq : Amazing essay from @Stammy talking about crypto designs: “we'll have to be careful about introducing thoughtful abstraction—simplifying and hiding complexity without diluting the essence of web3 or taking away control when it might be valued.” https://paulstamatiou.com/... Jason Marder / @jasonmarder : SO MUCH YES. I felt called to leave Stripe by a burning desire to be a part of the human-centered solutions to crypto's opacity problems. I'll do everything I can to help connect more actual people to the “for-the-people” ethos of Web3. More to share soon 😉 https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Stamatiou's essay lands at the peak of the late-2021 Web3 discourse, where the design critique cuts across the ideological lines drawn that same month: the sci-fi writer's notes from a Web3 "enemy", Stephen Diehl's warning about VCs dumping tokens on an enthusiastic public, and Molly White's later skeptic's Q&A all circle the same gap between the technology's promises and what an ordinary person actually experiences.
What makes the essay a useful data point rather than another take is its framing of the wallet as the entry point — the "Web3 passport" in the responding tweets — and its insistence that the $28B+ raised by crypto startups in 2021 has to show up as onboarding and key-custody improvements, not just protocol work, before the "next generation of users" the piece addresses arrives.
First-order effects
- Designers and product teams building crypto wallets and dapps get a concrete checklist — onboarding flow, seed-phrase handling, recovery, transaction clarity — where today's UX assumes the user already understands keys and gas.
- New users evaluating crypto hit the friction the essay documents directly: the current wallet experience is the bottleneck standing between curiosity and actual use.
Second-order effects
- The wave of capital and the talent migration out of big tech into crypto companies put wallet teams in direct competition for the designers who can close the usability gap, making UX quality a hiring battleground rather than a nice-to-have.
- Critics like White and Diehl sharpen the stakes: if the UX problems go unfixed, the skeptic case that Web3 serves speculators rather than users gets harder to answer.
Third-order effects
- If wallets become the passport and permission layer of Web3, whoever solves custody and onboarding well controls the industry's main interface — a structural shift from protocol competition to interface competition.
- The defender's argument that crypto is in "growing pains" on the way to transforming payments only holds if the design layer matures; otherwise the legitimacy gap the skeptics describe becomes permanent.
The trend: Crypto's next adoption wave is being decided at the design layer, where the wallet evolves from a developer tool into the permission layer ordinary users touch first.