My withdrawing nightmare and why crypto needs to be more user friendly

So this is what happened to me today:

For starters I need to explain that CDC lists ROSE, but that’s it. I don’t even see the point, it’s not on their exchange, you can’t do target buy on the app itself. To sum up how bad it is, you can target buy the AS Roma fan token on the app! But mostly, you can’t withdraw. So once you have it it’s forced HODL. The thing is, I want my crypto in my own wallet, and I want to stake it.

I need to explain here that I use CDC because Binance and CoinBase rejected my card. CDC works so it has to do.

Anyways I finally acknowledged that CDC will never do anything about ROSE, and that I have to find another way to withdraw. After a bit of research I decided to use MetaMask. That’s what I had to do:

1- swap to USDC, withdraw to the exchange and buy MATIC to avoid the spreads. 2- withdraw MATIC (low fees) 3- swap to wETH as told by the bridge tutorial I was following 4- try to bridge to Emerald paratime compatible ETH 5 - realize that you not only need MATIC but also ROSE for the receiving end gas fees.

At this point I tried to find a faucet but tbf during the bridging process it looked like I was meant to unwrap my ETH first, which I didn’t do, so I don’t think it would have worked anyways.

So I’m about to give up but I suddenly think of something: even though I don’t have a payment method on it, I have a Binance account and can withdraw from there. So:

1- I swapped my wETH back to MATIC 2- sent MATIC to Binance after a test transaction 3- swapped for ROSE

Then thankfully I decided to log on my ROSE wallet before doing a test transaction. I saw that my seed phrase somehow wasn’t working anymore. That’s despite having tested it after writing it down. Maybe it was deleted for being inactive and empty for months.

Created a new one. Transferred my ROSE on it, finally. But when I accidentally refreshed the page, I saw that every time you want to access it you have to input your seed phrase. So I downloaded Bitpie wallet which is compatible and created a new wallet, again.

I know that the whole process could have been shorter if I thought of Binance straightaway, but in the end it all shows that a lot of crypto isn’t user friendly and it will slow down adoption.

• having some exchanges not working in some countries
• not being able to withdraw a crypto you bought
• having to be wary of leaving your crypto on an exchange in the first place
• having to think about spreads and fees before moving things around
• having to do test transactions “just in case “
• bridging
• having a wallet only accessible via seed phrase that disconnect easily
  

That’s a list of not very user friendly things I encountered in what should have been a simple procedure in the first place.

TLDR: crypto needs to be more user friendly if we want to see mass adoption.