For years, one major critique of almost all crypto apps was that the user experience was clunky. For a long time, this felt true across all ecosystems, and there was good reason.

As I’ve written about before, crypto apps and products usually require some level of tradeoff between security, ease of use, and maintaining sufficient decentralization. Often the compromises needed for these tradeoffs came at the cost of less than awesome product design.

The result is that the design of crypto apps and products did not fit with what the future of finance (not to mention onchain ownership) should look like.

But things are changing.

Arrived: User-centric design for crypto

If there is a theme running through the last few weeks, the through-line is that crypto and onchain products are becoming easier and more intuitive to use.

These design upgrades touch everything from onboarding to sharing activity on social and being able to make purchases or move funds in real time.

After years of waiting, the timing feels aligned somehow. Easy-to-use design seems to be arriving all at once and across multiple facets of the crypto experience.

Recently, I’ve written about topics like universal money addresses, how Zora makes minting feel like Instagram, and the simplicity of a crypto smart wallet, etc., all of which are examples of how crypto is crypto is becoming less cumbersome.

Along those same lines, Solana just announced a new feature set that will also make crypto easier to use right from existing social feeds and web2 platforms.

I’m a believer in the idea of identifying trends by triangulation. If you see something once, it might be an anomaly. If you see something twice, it could be a coincidence. But if you see something three times, it’s probably time to pay attention.

The trend of easy-to-use and intuitive crypto product design is underway. It will be interesting to watch how this affects the next wave of adoption.