Getting started with Web3 is hard. Even at the height of the bear market in November 2021, with wall-to-wall media coverage, the survey said the space remained frustratingly impenetrable.

The Crypto Literacy report, released that month, found that only 33 percent of respondents thought buying Crypto was easy.

The report also showed that 96% of people in the US and 99% of people in Mexico and Brazil failed the Crypto literacy assessment. Clearly, we still have a long way to go.

Web3 is growing as fast as the early days of the Internet

Despite the low level of Crypto knowledge, there are encouraging signs when you look at the real data.

According to data analysis by a16z, there are now an estimated 50 million to 70 million active Ethereum users, which is very close to the Internet's popularity in 1995.

As the dominant smart contract platform, Ethereum can serve as a good, if imperfect, indicator.

If this trend continues, we'll still be in the early stages of adoption. The two giants of Web2, YouTube and Facebook, didn't launch until 10 years later.

In 1995, however, the vast majority of consumers were wary of shopping online. Entering bank card details into a web browser was not as common as it is now.

In my experience, it wasn't until the late 2000s that people in their 50s and 60s became regular users of e-commerce.

So can we expect Crypto to be popular in 10 years? The complexity of the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) suggests that we might.

However, unlike the Internet of 1995, the Web3 version of the Internet is significantly more complex. It also has a dense subculture that is difficult for outsiders to understand and penetrate.

Three barriers to adoption

According to Drew Tozer, head of design and marketing coordinator at Shipyard Software, the three biggest barriers to mass adoption are complexity, language, and desire.

"The space has an internal culture that makes complexity appealing to builders and designers; It allows community members to feel part of a small group that understands these topics. That mentality always discourages mass adoption."

Another obstacle, she told me, is that the Web3 native product is not intuitive.

At present, they lack common terminology and clear steps. "By using semiotics to help people connect the world they already know to these new concepts, we can start inviting anyone to participate."

Perhaps the most critical hurdle for Tozer is that for most people, Web3 doesn't address the immediate needs of most people.

"We cannot and should not adopt financial instruments on a large scale when our neighbors are poor, hungry and suffering from conflict," she said.

Another obstacle, according to Tozer, has to do with design teams. Most of the user experience in Web3 is based on the smart contracts that underpin it. Once a contract has been reviewed, it is difficult to change it.

"The design team can make the product look beautiful and include tooltips and helpful descriptions to build logic in the right way. But the usage is fixed. If something is clearly wrong with the user experience, the design team can only go back and explain how to fix it."

DeFi is the main culprit for complex user experiences

The collapse of the FTX and widespread suspicion of centralised exchanges have put the DeFi in the spotlight.

Not only does it help emphasize its decentralized nature, but the loss of billions of customer funds also helps sell its transparency, security and trustworthiness.

However, DeFi remains complex. Show any normmie who is not familiar with your average protocol and they may be left scratching their heads.

Even experienced Crypto traders can take a while to understand the pros and cons of a project. Too many protocols still rely on prior familiarity with the ecosystem. In order for DeFi to be competitive, it needs to make interacting with it easier.

Frontier founder Ravrinda Kumar is one such critic. Frontier is an unmanaged wallet across more than 35 blockchains.

Unlike DeFi, centralized exchanges such as Coinbase and FTX are simple and allow more users to join, he said.

"That's the trade-off people have to make when using these centralised services: you have less control over money and data, but they're easier to use."

He himself admits that the industry needs to focus more on user experience. "" Now that centralized exchanges have failed in terms of security, it's time for unmanaged wallets like Frontier to simplify the experience while maintaining self-hosted security." "

Last year, a Morning Consult report found that knowledge of the DeFi was incredibly low.

Less than a third of the average American has heard of DeFi, while 77% of Crypto owners have.

Optimists argue that the potential for growth is great. From a less sanguine perspective, the industry cannot prove its case. Both are undoubtedly true.

Better user interfaces precede user acceptance

Before you innovate, UI is putting the cart before the horse and expecting wider adoption of Web3, be it DeFi, NFT or Crypto. You can't have one without the other.

"The UI is not the most intuitive," Kumar continued. Among other adjectives, he describes it as "fragmented."

"Each chain has to use a different wallet. DeFi can be really hard to understand because it involves phrases or key management. But I am also confident that it will eventually be resolved."

Frontier is working on an MPC (multi-party computing) wallet that combines security with simplicity, he said. The MPC wallet is harder to exploit because it needs to leverage multiple parties at the same time.

It will also eliminate the need for a seed phrase/key at startup, Kumar said.

"Yes, there is more education and simplification to be done in general, but adoption will accelerate when these solutions are innovative in terms of simplification."