Why Eth UX is getting so much better (or at least could)

I used to work in an NFT company, but no longer do. When I entered the industry, UX was, well, horrific.

Everything took forever, interfaces were cryptic. Wallets were ugly software filled with (to most people) meaningless numbers. You constantly paid dozens of dollars for transactions that didn't even go through. Plus, onboarding to crypto as a new user felt like being initiated to a cult's rituals with seed phrases and stuff.

But I recently poked around again and saw that there have been a bunch of improvements:

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• Transactions are fast(er) and cheap(er)—on many L2s they're less than a cent.
• Wallets are so much faster and UIs are so much clearer. If you're using a newer wallet, you'll know exactly what a transaction does
• Many apps no longer assume you're a power users who knows every bit of crypto vocabulary.

Being able to watch this industry from the outside in is a ton of fun because you get to view user experience evolve in real time.

Here's why I think UX is getting better:

• Infrastructure I: L2s make it faster and cheaper to do more trivial transactions. It's so interesting how something app builders have no control over (speed of infra) meaningfully affects the user experience.
• Infrastructure II: Stuff like ERC-4337 and other protocol improvements enable building new things like account-abstracted wallets and embedded wallets. Again: We can have the best UX intents, but the core infrastructure needs to enable builders to create a certain experience.
• People actually want better UX now. Before the 2020/2021 NFT boom, crypto mostly targeted engineers. The boom flooded the industry with non-technical people, who didn't get Etherscan, Metamask etc. and made it work. But this misunderstanding led to a ton of scams and people not participating because the barriers were so high. When people started demanding UX that's understandable to "normies", new wallets and other interfaces came along to serve that need.
• Interface providers: There's a few companies now that basically offer "Good UX as a service" and provide web3 companies with the libraries and stuff that they need to improve their UX.

It's a lot of fun to observe this happening because the changes are so elemental. Outside of web3, there's such a UX arms race that a cool new loading animation gets talked about.

But in this industry, you can see how fundamental things get built. Anyone interested in the evolution of products in an industry should watch crypto evolve (with or without participating). It's such an interesting case study.

Btw, I wrote a full breakdown of the topic here if you're curious: https://www.commandbar.com/blog/crypto-web3-ux/