Translation: Plain Language Blockchain
I can’t make enough money from cryptocurrency to buy a new house or car, but overall, I feel cryptocurrency is a good idea. Maybe I don’t understand the deeper political details behind cryptocurrency enough, but in reality, it has positively and legitimately benefited my life.
I feel like I am caught between two types of users: on one hand, those who are still easily deceived or unaware of how to save on transaction fees, and on the other hand, those who have already seen everything that cryptocurrency has to offer. This allows me to connect and interact with a diverse range of people, from complete beginners to those who have built careers in cryptocurrency. In this article, I want to share some of my thoughts and reflect on the widespread adoption of cryptocurrency.
1. Where do I start?
My profession is content manager, focusing on educational practices. Currently, I design introductory content for beginners as well as those who consider themselves advanced users. In fact, I first developed a blockchain course for a university’s master’s program, and at that time, I had to start explaining from directed acyclic graphs (which I still haven’t used to this day) and 51% attacks. But even then, that didn’t save me: despite mastering that knowledge, it took me about a year to figure out how to save on transaction fees on the Ethereum network. At that time, terms like Optimism, Avalanche, and Arbitrum were just hollow buzzwords to me. It’s embarrassing to say, but it’s true.
Over time, information gradually became clear, and once I understood the relationship between consensus mechanisms, block formation in the blockchain, and transaction placement, everything clicked. In fact, I took two rounds of studying blockchain technology to truly understand it. Is that slow? Maybe. The comments will tell.
In any case, after two years of moderate learning, I finally feel that I basically understand most of it (including some minor details). However, many concepts only started to become intuitive when I focused on studying. For instance, to understand Ethereum’s L2 solutions, you first need to understand the problems Ethereum faces, and then understand the solutions L2 offers - or you could choose to blindly trust others and start using L2 directly. Even so, ordinary users wouldn’t feel these solutions are that important to them - they care about how to save on transaction fees and avoid spending more on Ethereum than the earnings of a day’s pool. And when I opened the Avalanche official website, the first thing I saw was the call to “build without borders.”
Avalanche official website - not a single word mentions how retail users can save on transaction fees.
Then, clicking on “New to Web3?” (Why would beginners know what Web3 is?), I was bombarded with terms like “smart contracts” and “Web3.” Your parents don’t even know they are on Web2, nor do they know they are being invited into a world called Web3, which also has smart contracts. Some might even remember Web1.
This might be a place to discuss whether ordinary people should go beyond centralized exchanges. But my thoughts lean towards making decentralized spaces accessible to everyone, not just geeks, content managers like me, merchants, and developers. So how do ordinary people feel about the crypto industry? Through conversations with about 100 people and observing thousands of messages, I gained some insights.
2. Public Opinion
“Cryptocurrency is a scam” By the end of 2024, there will still be people who believe that cryptocurrency is a scam. Interestingly, this is almost like the “bell curve” meme: cryptocurrency is viewed as a scam by those who have never interacted with it at all or by those who are involved in the development of projects. I haven’t reached an IQ of 145, placing me in the middle of this distribution.
These individuals are victims of unfulfilled narratives; you cannot expect constructive thinking from a narrative—it merely tells people a story. For example, “Just buy my crypto tokens and you’ll get 10x returns, buy a Lamborghini.” This narrative seems to date back to the ICO craze of 2016-2017. After that, this narrative failed, leading to a counter-narrative: cryptocurrency is a scam. Of course, the roots of this negative attitude lie in people’s age-old resistance to new things, a sentiment nourished by the scams of the past few years and current scams. Nowadays, “buy my token” has turned into meme coins, but fortunately, meme coins no longer represent the entire industry.
Top influencers who do not focus on cryptocurrency still confuse centralized exchanges with decentralized exchanges. And ordinary people (even advanced IT professionals and former NASA employees) simply do not understand the role of cryptocurrency; who can blame them? The cryptocurrency industry has not simplified the user experience, let alone explained its relationship with traditional finance.
At some point, I tried to delve deeper into blockchain - beyond “distributed database” - and figure out the roles of blocks and transactions within it. Even language models continuously instilled the same analogy in me, complicating the issue further: “Imagine a ledger that records transactions...” Imagine the frustration of an ordinary person trying to understand blockchain explorers, let alone figure out when their transaction was confirmed. Four years later, there has been no improvement in this area.
Do I need to watch a mini-course from Stanford to send some money to a friend without losing $50 in transaction fees when Ethereum gas fees spike? This is a rhetorical question.
Looking at the huge gap between the technical jargon of cryptocurrency and how non-crypto users communicate, it feels like the current user experience is built by developers for developers - or, at best, designed by hardcore crypto enthusiasts for other hardcore enthusiasts. These are completely different linguistic worlds, making it difficult for someone with no technical background to break through. This complexity broadly helps maintain exit liquidity, but if we want more people to join, it becomes a disadvantage. For fundamental operations like buying and selling, having such a complex linguistic environment seems a bit excessive.
But on the other hand, should we really try to make people understand things beyond USDT? Or is it sufficient to simply enable them to buy an Avalanche card for everyday spending?
3. “I still consider myself a beginner”
This is a self-assessment of those who are familiar with centralized exchanges, understand decentralization (but have not used its “benefits”), and are trying to invest in crypto assets. Again, this has nothing to do with educational level - these people are very diverse. Very few go further, and AAVE is their “boundary” (as confirmed by TVL data). Some don’t even know they can avoid Ethereum’s high fees, let alone how to check fees, but everyone is struggling with the protocol interfaces. Each protocol feels different, making it unclear what to do, leading to a fear of continuing to operate, ultimately causing them to stop participating - this is a true statement from an employee of a crypto hedge fund.
It's hard to blame protocols for not caring about user-friendliness because these issues should be resolved through standardization. But now imagine a standardized cryptocurrency protocol webpage and mobile interface; it really does seem a bit far-fetched. Moreover, no one knows how to check their transaction status: why has the transaction been pending for several hours, is the money lost, or where to seek support (there's none at all). Very few people understand blockchain explorers. If they have heard of them, they don’t know where to find them. Should I even mention how difficult it is to find links to these explorers without being scammed?
A simple and obvious conclusion drawn from my experience is: the fewer additional steps required to reach a goal, the more likely people are to succeed. Yet the current customer journey map (CJM) resembles that infamous funnel, with Vitalik seemingly sitting at the bottom.
For example, for these people, “staking ETH to support network security” makes no sense. To understand this concept, one must first understand the PoS consensus mechanism, which means you must understand why consensus mechanisms are important.
The sad reality is that even those who seem to be more “advanced” than true beginners are still merely exit liquidity. In the worst-case scenario, these “beginners” may lose access to their funds. For instance, one of my clients panicked after creating a second wallet linked to her MetaMask account on Fuel Network, thinking she had lost her money. This makes me feel that the current crypto industry is just traditional financial tools, inviting people in to make money or, at best, break even before returning to traditional finance.
Considering that I still can’t buy sausage with Bitcoin in Europe, this seems to be the case. So is that bad? Not really. Should someone be held responsible? Hard to say, because buying sausage with cryptocurrency requires explicit government approval. It cannot be achieved solely by enthusiasts and developers. However, despite our frequent discussions about borderless transactions and the tokenization of sausage, this aspect has received surprisingly little attention in the industry, even though it could genuinely improve people’s lives.
4. Advanced users - myth or reality?
This question, of course, aims to highlight the toxic situation in the industry, where people often see each other as fools or at best, beginners. In the crypto industry, so-called “advanced users” are essentially those with complete professional skills. What I think of as “advanced” users are those who depend on this industry for their livelihood in some way: algorithmic traders, analysts, developers, and those who exploit various profit mechanisms (like wash trading, node operators, gamblers, etc.).
Interestingly, they are divided into two types: highly empathetic and highly toxic. And the reason is simple - there is a huge gap between the beginners mentioned in the previous paragraph and the advanced users mentioned in this paragraph. Toxic users are unwilling to help beginners bridge this gap, while only those who are empathetic can explain what is happening. People in the crypto industry typically help each other. But on the other hand, I’ve seen a chat group where even asking “What’s the difference between staking and liquid staking?” can get you muted.
For these individuals, becoming an advanced user requires years of learning and unequal financial investment. However, even “advanced” is a relative term - someone may be very experienced in analyzing the business models of crypto projects, but inadvertently, they could become liquidity exits in a meme coin or fall victim to an MEV attack. Even in a hurry, they might get tricked into a phishing address in their transaction history.
By the way, the security issues in the crypto industry deserve a separate article. Aside from all the complexities I mentioned above, users will soon face issues of security and fund protection. And this challenge will never lose relevance, regardless of skill level. Once, I even heard a story about someone stealing private keys by monitoring screen radiation. But these are just some thoughts; it’s a conceptual problem in the industry: more freedom = more responsibility.
From a practical standpoint, based on our user onboarding experience, when users start regularly using non-custodial wallets, I would consider them advanced users. Coincidentally, these individuals usually navigate protocols well and do not get lost in specialized technologies like Uni V3. At this point, the degree of advancement begins to show a right-skewed distribution: the level of advancement far exceeds any degree of ignorance. Generally speaking, understanding all the basic concepts in the industry requires 3 to 6 months of focused study, while reaching skill limits and understanding details may take even longer. This seems to be the key to distinguishing between highly toxic and highly empathetic individuals.
By the way, 3 to 6 months is not a random number. That is precisely the time a former banker spends immersing themselves in crypto concepts.
5. My Focus
Perhaps I seem to be criticizing or skeptical. In part, that may be true, but globally, I understand that this is the way it is now, and it’s not as simple as going to Avalanche’s customer success department and asking them to “simplify” everything. I want to highlight the contradiction of this situation. Many people in the industry are waiting for retail liquidity to flood in - that is, mass adoption. It seems this should drive Bitcoin to valuations in the millions or billions, relieve regulatory pressure, or protect people's assets from banking mistakes or abuses. Essentially, different stakeholders - crypto investors, crypto anarchists, and ordinary globalists - all have their reasons. However, it becomes absurd - mass adoption is impossible to achieve when even a basic user onboarding process cannot be found, not even on those L2 homepages that claim to improve user experience.
Interestingly, this task often falls on the shoulders of ordinary users (or YouTubers). Most newcomers are stuck on centralized exchanges (CEX), which are only loosely connected to blockchain and decentralized ideals. And when beginners are trapped on CEX, the decentralized space remains merely a subset of traditional finance, as it is a playground for technically savvy users with plenty of free time to self-actualize.
Telegram attempts to attract traffic through airdrops and TG mini-apps, providing an interactive immersive experience. This is better than nothing, but it also leads to two problems:
1) The entire immersive experience is limited to the TON ecosystem (hopefully just for now).
2) A large group of people (131 million) disappointed by the Hamster Kombat airdrop became victims of the narrative that “crypto is a scam.”
One of the most interesting factors for driving mass adoption that I have seen is the call to learn about Bitcoin. This is undoubtedly a good practice, but first, a political theory from the mid-19th century was also promoted as the gateway to a bright future (of course, the masses never went to learn it). Secondly, I bet people are more likely to jokingly buy Bitcoin under the influence of crypto Twitter rather than after reading the white paper. Here, I advocate for some realism.
I don’t know if we really need mass adoption, or if the entire industry is just a quirky way of wealth redistribution. Or maybe we actually need mass adoption, but right now developers are scratching their heads, wondering how to explain to a shop owner in Alabama why keeping funds in a Rabby wallet instead of a bank is cool. Currently, the positioning of the crypto industry around mass adoption feels completely disconnected. Money transactions - the most common behavior in our lives - should not create such a huge cognitive burden, nor should they take up so much time.
