Imagine someone’s first day in crypto. They heard the promises of owning their own money, gaining access to the global markets and participating in the new economy. They download a wallet, buy some ETH and find an interesting app. Then it happens.
“Please switch to the basic network.”
What? They google feverishly, watch a YouTube tutorial, and maybe they find out, maybe they won’t. Most people just leave, with a study finding 80% of crypto users, ending blockchains within 90 days.
The biggest innovation in the last decade – spreading powerful blockchains – has inadvertently created Web3’s greatest weakness: a user experience so fragmented and clumsy that it pushes everyone except the most specific users.
And the most shiny symptom of this failure? The humble “network switch”, a feature that has become a symbol of everything that holds us back.
Metamask -the years taught me everything
When I was at Consensys a decade ago, the mission was simple. Aboard the world to Ethereum through metamask. Back then, there was a chain available to metamask users. Users could just focus on the applications, the possibilities, the revolution we built. Metamask succeeded spectacularly as a gateway with millions of users and billions in volume.
But seeing its development revealed the fundamental problem of our industries. Dropdown “Networks” that appeared like other launched chains was not a feature – it was an admission of failure. We have prioritized technical expansion rather than user understanding.
The brutal truth is that if users are to think about chains, we have already lost.
Why everyone hates using crypto
Want to use Ethereum assets on a Solana app today? Tighten up. First, find a bridge (good luck in choosing the safe, compatible option with a low fee). Connect your wallet. Approve tokens. Pay gas. Wait for confirmations. Change network in your wallet. Connect again. Hope nothing went wrong. Check three different block researchers to track your assets.
It’s madness. We live in the digital equivalent with pre-internet dark ages when you needed to know if a service was on AOL or computing and manually calling different networks. The Internet did not win because it had better technology. It won when this complexity disappeared.
Each network contact costs us users through gas fees and how it wastes time. Each confused transaction kills adoption. Each “Incorrect Network” Error Message Pushes Mainstream -ACCEP FROM FURTHER. We do not lose to traditional funding because they are better. We lose because they are simpler.
Developers are also drowning
Wallets are blamed, but they just show the mess below. The real disaster lives on the fund.
A founder recently told me their fracture point. “We launched at Ethereum and so real traction. Users loved it. Then we tried to expand to Solana and Sui to reach more people. Suddenly we learn brand new programming languages, duct-taping chains along with sketched bridges and maintained three separate code bases. Six months later we gave up on the expansion. The complexity killed us.”
This story is repeated everywhere. Team spends more time managing infrastructure than construction products. Liquidity fragments across chains. Users get confused about which version to use. Innovation suffocates under operational overhead.
We force users to be their own travel agencies in a world of incompatible airlines. Need to go from Ethereum to Solana to Arbitum? Find out the connections yourself. Book each leg separately. Hope your assets arrive. What we desperately need is Expedia for Blockchains. Something that handles the whole journey invisibly while users focus on their destination.
The correction already exists
The solution requires more than better wallet interfaces or smoother bridges. We need chain abstraction. We need applications to interact with any chain naturally, making the underlying blockchain invisible to users.
This technology exists today. More teams build it. AccountBraction solutions like Zerodev improve the wallet user experience, and cross-cutting chain messaging solutions such as chainlink CCIP help move data from chain A to chain B. Blockchains like Zetachain (where I am a core contribution institution) approaching it differently. From day one, they activate apps that span all major chains, including the Bitcoin network, which is not normally supported by the transverse chain’s smart-contract platforms.
Imagine a universal layer that safely connects to all chains where a single smart contract manages assets such as stablecoins and logic everywhere simultaneously. Users see a simple action with a click like Swap Native BTC for ETH, deposit stableecoins on Ethereum in a dividend app on Solana or accept payment in any sign of any chain. The protocol handles all the complex execution of transverse chain automatically. No popups. No shifts. No fear of being on the “right” network.
The infrastructure works. What is missing is to admit that our current approach is unsuccessful and obliged to implement something radically simpler.
Time to choose
The Crypto industry is on a crossroads. We can continue to build for ourselves, add more chains, more bridges, more complexity and remain a niche corner of funding. Or we can finally put users first.
Do you remember why we started this movement? To create a better financial system. To give people control. To eliminate intermediaries. None of it matters if ordinary people cannot use what we build.
The network contact must become a museum piece, a relic from when we were too focused on technology to see people trying to use it. Each major breakthrough in computing came when the complexity was hidden. From command lines to GUIs, from manual IP addresses to domain names, from desktop -software to cloud services.
Our moment has arrived. The technology to make Blockchains invisible is here, proven and clear. The question is not whether we can solve Web3’s user experience.
The question is whether we have the courage to admit that we broke it in the first place.
