Crypto UX Status Report - March 2023

How does crypto UX stand at the beginning of March 2023?

Crypto is still difficult to use by normal people.

Key metrics we like to use to measure payment platform usability still show significant gaps between crypto payments platforms and popular digital payment apps.

Perfecting Product's key metrics for crypto payment usability:

1. Time to Payment Finality

How long does it take to confirm successful payments?

2. Cost per Transaction

How much does it cost to perform crypto transactions?

3. Difficulty of Onboarding

How easy is it to start making normal purchases or transactions?

4. Difficulty of Offboarding

How easy is it to liquidate your existing crypto assets into stablecoins or traditional forms of curency?

5. Transaction Reliability

How often does the crytocurrency's blockchain experience downtime, outages, or extranormal pricing of transactions that prevent normal use?

Recent measures of crypto user experience

Founder of Ethereum Vitalik recently shared Ethereum's progress on time to finality via his blog, showing the EIP 1559 has made significant progress in improving time to finality since before the upgrade.

However the Ethereum blockchain's time to finality is still significantly slower than consumers themselves have to wait for traditional credit card purchases.

Solana's network is faster and cheaper than the traditional payment's ecosystem, but has two major caveats. It suffers from significant centralization to create its initial advantages and despite this continues to suffer from significant outages preventing major business adoption.

Meaningful recent changes to crypto UX since Feb 2023:

Ethereum has integrated a major change to improve the user experience.

ERC-4337 is a new standard for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain. It aims to simplify the creation, transfer, and management of NFTs, making it easier for developers and users to interact with these digital assets.

By providing a standardized format for NFTs, ERC-4337 could potentially improve crypto UX by:

Streamlining the NFT creation process: With a standardized format, developers can create and deploy NFTs more easily and efficiently, reducing the time and effort required to create and manage these digital assets.

Simplifying NFT transfers: ERC-4337 makes it easier to transfer NFTs between different wallets and platforms, potentially reducing the number of steps required to complete a transaction.

Enhancing NFT interoperability: Standardization also makes it easier for different NFTs to work together, enabling new use cases and interactions between digital assets.

Overall, the integration of ERC-4337 could lead to a more seamless and user-friendly experience for those interacting with NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. However, the impact of this standardization will depend on the adoption and implementation by developers and platforms within the crypto industry.