Picture of a person’s first day in crypto. They heard promises about owning their own money, accessing global markets, and participating in the new economy. They download a purse, buy some ETH, and find a interesting app. Then it happened.
“Please move to the base network.”
What? They are frantically Google, watching a YouTube tutorial, and they might know it, maybe not. Most just left, with a study search 80% of crypto users Stop the blockchains for 90 days.
The greatest change of the last decade – the proliferation of powerful blockchains – has accidentally created the greatest weakness of the Web3: a user experience that has broken and clumsy that pushes it all but the most determined users.
And the most sensible symptom of this failure? The humble “network switch”, a feature that has been a symbol of everyone that prevents us.
The metamask years taught me everything
When I was on Consensys a decade ago, the mission was simple. Onboard the world in Ethereum by metamask. Back then, there was a chain available to metamask users. Users can focus only on applications, the possibilities, the revolution we are building. Metamask succeeded in amazing -amazing as that gateway with millions of users and billions.
But watching its evolution has revealed the main problem in our industry. The downfall of “networks” that have emerged as other chains launched is not a feature – it is an entry of failure. We are ahead of technical expansion in understanding the user.
The brutal fact is that if users had to think about the chains, we would have gone.
Why does everyone hate the use of crypto
Do you want to use Ethereum assets in a Solana app today? Buckle up. First, find a bridge (good luck with choosing a safe, compatible, low -paid choice). Connect your purse. Approve the tokens. Pay gas. Wait for confirmations. Switch networks to your purse. Connect again. Hope nothing is wrong. Check three different block explorers to track your genitals.
Madness. We live in the digital equivalent of the pre-internet Dark Ages, if you need to know if a service is in AOL or CompuServe and manually dial on different networks. The Internet does not win because it has better technology. It wins when the complexity disappears.
Each network switch prompt is worth US users, through gas fees and how it wastes time. Each confused transaction kills the adoption. Each error message “Incorrect Network” drives the receiving primary acceptance to the distance. We are not lost in traditional finances because they are better. We are missing because they are simpler.
Those who have developed are also drowning
The wallets are blamed, but they only show the mess underneath. True catastrophe lives on the foundation.
A founder recently told me their break point. “We launched in Ethereum and saw the real traction. Users love it. Then we try to expand Solana and Sui to reach more people. Suddenly, we learn new languages of programming, duct-taping chains along with sketchy bridges, keeping three separate codebases. Six months later, we surrendered.
This story repeats everywhere. Teams spend more time managing infrastructure than developing products. Watering fragments throughout the chain. Users are confused about which version to use. Innovation suffers under operation overhead.
We force users to become their own travel agents in a world of incompatible planes. Need to go from Ethereum to Solana to Arbitrum? Learn the connections to yourself. Book each leg separately. Hope your assets arrive. All we need is the expedia for blockchains. Something that holds the whole journey by accident as users focus on their destination.
The arrangement is already there
The solution requires more of the better purse interfaces or a better bridge. We need chain abstraction. We need the ability for applications to interact with any native chain, making the underlying blockchain that users do not see.
This technology exists today. Many teams build it. Account abstraction solutions such as Zerodev improve the purse user experience, and cross-chain messaging solutions such as the chainlink CCIP helps transfer data from chain A to Chain B. Blockchain like Zetachain (which I am a major contributing) approach. From one day, they activate apps that cover all major chains, including the Bitcoin network, which are usually not supported by cross-chain smart-contract platforms.
Imagine a universal layer that safely connects to all the chains, where a single intelligent contract manages property -owners like stablecoins and logic anywhere at the same time. Users see a simple click action such as Swap Native BTC for ETH, Deposit Stablecoins in Ethereum in a NOBAAna app yield, or accept payment to any token in any chain. Protocol automatically manages all complex cross-chain implementation. No popups. No movement. There is no anxiety about being a “right” network.
Infrastructure works. The missing is to admit that our current approach failed and made the implementation of something simpler.
Time to choose
The crypto industry stands at a branch. We can keep building for ourselves, adding more chains, more bridges, more complexity, and staying a corner of finance. Or finally we can prioritize users.
Remember why we started this movement? To create a better financial system. To give people to control. To eliminate mediators. None of those things if regular people cannot use what we build.
The network switch needs to be a piece of the museum, a relic since we were too focused on technology to see people trying to use it. Every major success in computing comes when complexity is hidden. From the command lines to the GUIs, from manu IP addresses to domain names, from desktop software to cloud services.
Our moment has come. The technology to make blockchains that are invisible is here, proven, and ready. The question is not whether we can adjust the web3 user experience.
The question is whether we have the courage to admit that we broke it in the first place.
