Coinbase and other crypto companies hope to boost adoption with UX
Build it and they will come, perhaps, but making crypto easier to use is turning out to be just as important
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Crypto companies are looking to improve their user experiences and interfaces in hopes of onboarding new customers.
Centralized crypto exchange Coinbase recently enabled users of its Wallet app to link directly to crypto payments through messaging apps, including WhatsApp, iMessage and Telegram.
“With this launch, users can now send money across borders for free using the most commonly accessible identifier – a phone number or email address – as opposed to needing to know the recipient’s wallet address,” Chintan Turakhia, Coinbase senior director of engineering told Blockworks.
“By reducing complexity while expanding global access, we hope to enable millions of new people to engage with the crypto economy.”
Sending crypto is free and settled instantly, Coinbase said. Recipients will have up to two weeks to claim the money sent to them before they are returned to the sender.
Turakhia said Coinbase believes the best way to increase economic freedom is by simplifying the payment experience.
Decentralized crypto trading platform Matcha meanwhile recently enabled cross-chain swaps across seven blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, BSC and Avalanche.
This means that Matcha users will be able to swap tokens across various blockchains without having to leave the Matcha interface or visit a separate bridging site.
Safety remains a barrier to crypto adoption
With improvements like these, the crypto space may find it easier to introduce users to their products.
But lacking trust in crypto is still a chief concern. Ido Ben-Natan, the co-founder and CEO of Blockaid, notes that a crucial part of the UX narrative will be improved user security.
“Survey after survey shows that one of the key barriers to entry for web3 users is the perception that it’s easy to get scammed,” Ben-Natan told Blockworks.
In fact, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, over 75% of Americans in the US who have heard of crypto remain skeptical of its safety and reliability.
Of the Americans who do hold cryptocurrencies, the majority of them (74%) first purchased crypto between one and five years ago, with only a handful (16%) having decided to purchase crypto over the past year.
An estimated 31% of traders who have previously purchased or traded crypto no longer own any.
“For peer-to-peer payments to flourish globally, we need to make it easy for users to stay safe. This is why we’re laser-focused on working with the largest wallet providers to protect users globally from malicious actors,” Ben-Natan said.
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