Solve crypto’s janky UX problem. You haven’t noticed yet.

For the past 15 years, crypto has struggled to gain mainstream adoption because it is difficult to use. The benefits of decentralized and decentralized money are clear, but the junky user experience presents a very high bar for entry.

From the gut-wrenching comfort of 15 minutes of working out how to use pedigrees and hardware wallets to landing a large amount of crypto on a misspelled 34-character address – UX awaits the common man.

And once you know Ethereum or Bitcoin, there are a million other blockchains, each with their own unique rules and characteristics, with no easy way to transfer assets or actions between them.

But 2025 is the year when crypto finally becomes user-friendly.

iPhone moment for crypto UX

Nemil Dalal, product lead for Coinbase's developers platform, said the technology is evolving very quickly, saying, “You can't figure out crypto in like two, three years.” It will be completely different.”

“It seems like we were building mainframes back in the day, and now it's like the iPhone moment. We saw all these dreams, [that] What we have tried and failed to do for years, is now, suddenly possible.

Today, a single click can start a stable, complex cross-chain transaction almost instantly. Users can log into a crypto wallet or sign up for the service using a fingerprint linked to a Gmail address. The new technology allows decentralized applications to feel like Coinbase and allow you to trade any coin or use any protocol on any chain.

The magic of intents, passwords and chain summaries means that new users to crypto will have a completely different experience than in the past. All the complexity is being stripped away from under the hood.

Abstract as a concept in crypto UX

The biggest advancements are often of the abstract kind – whether it's chaining, tagging, or making life easier for users. Although it sounds like jargon, abstraction is a well-known concept in technology.

Simply put, it just means hiding all the complicated bits from the end user that would otherwise require a dozen manual steps to automate a series of steps with the click of a button.

A coffee machine is a real-world example. Brewing coffee requires boiling and grinding the beans, heating the water or milk, measuring the right amount of coffee in the batch container, tapping, and so on. With a coffee machine, stick a coffee pod in the slot, press a button and the machine takes care of the rest.

This is finally happening in crypto.

“What the industry needs and what the end users want is a simple and seamless interface for advanced use cases,” said Dean Tribble, CEO of Agoric Systems.

Ideas: Crypto One Click Solution

In the last year or two, the design philosophy around intents has become popular among blockchain devs. It simplifies the user experience by allowing people to define the goal without having to understand the technical stuff.

The analogy in Web2 is the online shopping experience. Studies indicate that up to 70% of shopping carts are abandoned because the checkout process is too complicated and each additional click increases the likelihood of it happening. After Amazon introduced one-click ordering, each customer shopped 28.5% more often, and revenue increased by 838% in one year.

Intents are the Web3 version of one-click authentications. With recent protocols, you can just click a button (specifying your intent) and then a network of unauthorized third-party fillers or solvers will make it happen.

“Users define high-level goals, such as ‘convert my BTC to ETH and share it,'” Tribble explains. “Multiple parties—challengers—determine and execute the best ways to achieve those goals.”

Cain Warwick, who built some of the most sophisticated but uncommunicative Defi projects in history with Synthetix, was thrilled when he realized that most users wanted things that worked. The new project Infinex takes advantage of all the latest UX developments in an attempt to become a one-stop shop for crypto across all chains.

Objectives mean users don't need to know if the transaction they want to make involves a centralized exchange or an onchain order book – the solvers do.

“The order is transmitted in the best possible place,” he explains.

“So you, as a user, say: ‘I want to use long Pepe.' Well, we can send that to the prospectors, and they'll go and find the lowest amount, the best performance, the best place to fill that business. And we will refund that trade, and it will be saved in your Infinex account, and when you want to resolve it, you can click, go back to solvers and resolve it.

The chain summary makes the cross chain seamless

Ideas are one way to chain abstraction, but there are many other combinations, says Tribble.

“Different approaches to on-chain abstraction have emerged, many of which are complementary, including ints, functional requirements, wallet-based solutions, etc. All aimed at streamlining workflows, enhancing user experience, or sometimes both.”

On-chain aggregation means users don't have to worry about what network they're using and can easily trade cross-chain. Multichain smart wallet allows users to hold different tokens collected from different chains in one smart wallet.

On January 15, Infinex launched the Swage app (which stands for Swap and Bridge) for patrons, allowing users to exchange 1,000 tokens between the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems without paying gas fees.

Under the hood, it's powered by the Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter Exchange and the cross-chain protocols Mayan Swap and LiFi, both of which use Intense-like designs.

But that's just the beginning as Infinex is partnering with Near blockchain to implement on-chain abstraction and on-chain signature technology. That will allow it to add trading, security and other services to older chains like Bitcoin and XRP later this quarter.

Near itself released a beta version in December that allows users to plug in MetaMask and easily exchange 30 tokens between 10 blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Solana, Near, XRP and Doge. Intense has the ability to connect any chain and fiat and is currently running 15 projects.

Near founder Ilya Polosukin was a co-author of the seminal Google Transformer research, and the project focused on AI. Close Intents is designed to allow agents to pay for tasks with each other in any currency or in any chain, or to book flight tickets or order your favorite grocery when Fiat runs out.

Within hours of TRUMP's launch this week, both NearIntents and Swij were offering on-chain exchanges to allow users to buy the coin.

Beyond Protocol, which now offers Uniswap Bridge, launched a Tencent-powered bridge with v3 in February 2024. Other protocols and protocols that work with on-chain abstraction technology or networks are Socket Protocol, Agorik, and Everclear.

Passwords: Crypto wallet security made easy

Another major increase in usage for ordinary people is the use of passkeys to access crypto accounts. New users can sign up in 20 seconds using a Web2 account such as Universal X or Infinex from Gmail, Apple or Facebook.

Passkeys use biometrics on your phone to access encryption keys stored on your device's Trusted Platform Module. While not as secure and bombproof as a hardware wallet, it's a million times easier for newcomers.

“You can log in from your MacBook, your Windows machine, your Android phone, and it feels the same,” Warwick said. “No need to move genealogy. or do something strange; You only have to agree. It's a web app, and all your crypto is there.

The danger with passwords is that if you lose access to your device, you may lose access to your crypto. But there are ways to prevent disaster. On Infinex, for example, you can add a backup wallet address to which your money will be sent if you brick your phone.

Warwick says the industry has wasted years trying to educate consumers about “why it's important to bury genealogies in your backyard.”

“We have the technology now and we need the technology and the right approach. And the right approach is to look at what the user wants to do and get them to do it with as little friction as possible.”

Blockchain interoperability unites crypto

Interoperability on Ethereum L2s will improve significantly this year, with the adoption of new ERC and RIP standards that enable on-chain transactions and trustless executions. Jesse Pollack of Bethesda told the magazine at Devcon that he believes most issues with siled L2s will be resolved within six months.

“Basically, it's going to, like, disappear, and it's not going to be all these scattered L2s anymore. Instead, it will be your only wallet that lets you work everywhere.

There are a variety of communication solutions out there that approach the problem from different angles, including Optimism's Superchain concept, LayerZero's bridging technology, Wormhole's crosschain network of nodes, and Chainlink's crosschain messaging and tokenization standards.

Polygon Aglier aims to integrate all smart contract L1s and L2s into an independent, crosschain settlement layer that unifies liquidity and users and posts the final level to Ethereum. It will begin integrating chains this quarter and will begin rapid chain transfers starting in March or April.

Polygon co-founder Brendan Arsoeder says it makes intensive and on-chain abstraction more efficient and eliminates the need for sealed tokens.

“It's this experience that makes you want to use a single chain, even if you're crossing boundaries between different chains.”

SafeWallet is launching SafeNet this year, which aims to replicate Visa's transaction security and speed in the blockchain world by using a network of processors to handle cross-chain transactions.

Initially available through Safe Wallet, SafeNet allows users to merge their different balances from different chains into one, and cross-chain transactions must settle within 500 milliseconds.

Decentralized crypto UX web2 style functionality

This year, Ethereum L2 MegaETH, which aims to hit 100,000 transactions per second, as well as Solana's Firedancer client, are expected to be even bigger. Faster transactions combined with passport keys, chain abstraction, intents, and interoperability bring significant improvements in usability for end users.

One of the biggest UX improvements for decentralized exchanges is the growth of aggregators like 1inch and Cowswap, which are front ends that allow users to find the best way to trade on different DEXs.

The next evolution seems to be user-friendly web front ends that allow users to access the best applications, protocols and services, including Spot, Perps, Borrowing and Borrowing from a single interface.

“DeFi is incredibly good at innovation. We're not here to build protocols, right?” “You have things like Monad, like MegaETH; You have L2 stacks that try to be ultra-low latency and enable things like onchain order books,” he explains.

“And there's more to come. That's what we're here for. We only want the best technology, and we make that technology available to consumers. Once a new chain is launched with some new awesome DX order book system we can enable that.

The future is AI agents

Coinbase's Dalal believes that in the near future you will be able to issue natural language voice commands to AI agents or have them perform actions such as automatically rebalancing your crypto portfolio or implementing a trading strategy based on sentiment.

But Polygon Farmer cautions that the technology is currently too immature to risk a consumer-level agent controlling a wallet that contains too much crypto.

“I think there's a risk that AIA agents who manage funds that are unsupervised or poorly supervised can sometimes behave in unpredictable ways. “So we as an industry want to make sure that those AI agents are safe and behave consistently with what their people want,” Farmer said.