We have assumed certain patterns in crypto as the correct ones, when undoubtedly, they are wrong when we talk about consumer adoption or even institutions. Wallets and applications target degens (since the are the ones that have had the size to actually move the needle) and technical people since the tech wasn’t fully ready for adoption.

Tell me what’s simpler, paying with your credit card online, or paying with your Wallet? We only had one job, and yet we failed at it. We have accepted the lack of privacy, that a wrong transaction might make you lose it all, or lately even the lack of transparency and inner functioning of the systems (see for example RWAs held at banks and then tokenized).

Onboarding users to new wallets is a very painful problem, lot’s of us have “died” in that hill trying, but what makes me feel worse is that even if we had succeeded, we would have actually failed.

Let’s think what wallets generally do:

  • An address to receive and send funds: I’m purposefully avoiding mentioning keys, since many new wallets do now make direct use of private keys as the entity holding the assets, but simply to initiate transactions on behalf of smart contracts that actually hold the users funds.
  • Execute arbitrary executions: These could come in many shapes or form, some wallets are more explicit and have embedded some executions directly in the wallet and some others leave it open for the user to simply send arbitrary executions to it.
  • Display balance: And balance it’s a weird term in crypto… what’s the value of an NFT? What’s the value of art? What’s the value of vestksdUSD? Yes that’s a very real token, whose value is weird to display where that’s not what matters in it, but the time it’s locked for, for example.

In all honesty? That’s it. All the rest is there to decorate, to make these three possible in one way or another. And even tho it’s only these three, we have manged to mess them all up. Not even one of them is generally properly done.