I didn’t make enough from cryptocurrencies to buy a new house or even a car, but I do think crypto is a good idea overall. Maybe I’m missing some of the deep-rooted political nuances around crypto, but in reality, it’s already benefiting my life — in a positive, legal way.

It feels like I’m somewhere in the middle between users who still get caught in scams or don’t know how to save on transaction fees, and those who have seen everything crypto has to offer. This lets me connect with and engage a wide range of people, from the greenest newbies to those building businesses on crypto. In this article, I want to share a mixed bag of my thoughts and reflect on the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies.

Where did I start?

By profession, I’m a content manager specializing in educational practices. Right now, I create onboarding for beginners — and for those who consider themselves advanced clients. I actually started by developing a blockchain program for a master’s program at a university, where I had to start with directed acyclic graphs (which have yet to be useful) and the 51% attack. But even this didn’t save me: despite that knowledge, I only figured out the basic ways to save on Ethereum network transaction fees a year or so later. During that time, things like Optimism, Avalanche, or Arbitrum were just empty buzzwords to me. Embarrassing, but honest.

Over time, information crystallized, and things clicked once I understood how consensus mechanisms, block formation in blockchain, and transaction placement all connect. It actually took me two rounds of studying blockchain technology to understand it. Am I slow? Maybe. I’ll find out in the comments.

Anyway, after two years of moderate studying, I felt I finally understood most of the major — and minor — concepts. Nothing became intuitively clear until I put in focused effort. For instance, to understand the idea of L2 solutions in Ethereum, you first need to understand Ethereum’s problems, then understand the solutions L2s offer — or blindly trust someone and start using L2. Even then, the average person won’t find those solutions meaningful — they care about how to save money on transactions and avoid spending more in Ethereum than they earned in a day’s yield from a pool. And the first thing I see when I open Avalanche’s site is an appeal to “build without borders.”

Avalanche homepage — not a word for retail about transaction cost savings.

And then, after clicking “New to Web3?” (why would a beginner even know what Web3 is?), I get bombarded with terms like smart contracts and Web3. Your parents would never know they’re on Web2 or that they’re being invited into something called Web3 with smart contracts. Some of them might even remember Web1.

This is probably a place to debate whether the average person should even go beyond a centralized exchange. But my thoughts lean toward making decentralized space accessible to everyone, not just geeks, content managers like me, businesspeople, and developers. So how do regular people feel in the crypto industry? Over time, I’ve spoken to about 100 people and observed thousands of messages.

“Crypto is a scam”

In 2024, and at its close, there are still people who think crypto is a scam. Funny enough, it resembles the bell curve meme: crypto is considered a scam by people who either haven’t touched it at all or are involved in project development. I haven’t hit IQ 145 and sit somewhere in the middle of the distribution.

These people are victims of an unfulfilled narrative, and you can’t expect constructive thinking from a narrative — it tells people a story. Like, “Make 10x on a Lambo just by buying my crypto token.” This narrative seems to stretch back to 2016–2017 with the ICO boom. And after that narrative failed, a counter-narrative arose: crypto is a scam. The basis of this dismissive attitude, of course, is the age-old resistance to new things, fertilized by scams from past years and the present. Now “buy my token” has turned into meme coins, but fortunately, meme coins no longer represent the entire industry.

Top influencers who don’t specialize in crypto still confuse centralized exchanges with decentralized ones. And regular folks (senior-level IT professionals, even one former NASA employee) simply don’t understand what crypto does, and who could blame them? The crypto industry offers no user experience simplification, let alone explaining how it relates to traditional finance.

Somewhere along the way, I tried understanding blockchain in detail — beyond “a distributed database” — and figuring out what role blocks and transactions play. Even language models kept feeding me the same analogy, making things worse: “Imagine a ledger where transactions are recorded…” Imagine the frustration an average person must feel trying to understand block explorers, let alone figuring out when their transaction is confirmed. Things haven’t improved in this area over four years.

Do I need to watch a Stanford University mini-course just to send my friend some money and not lose $50 in transaction fees when Ethereum gas spikes? A rhetorical question.

Looking at the huge gap between established crypto terminology and how non-crypto people communicate, it feels like user experience is currently built by developers for developers — or, at best, by hardcore crypto enthusiasts for other hardcore enthusiasts. These are just different linguistic worlds, and for a person unconnected to technology, it’s hard to break through. This complexity is helpful for maintaining exit liquidity in a broad sense but bad if we want more people to come in. It seems excessive to have such a complicated linguistic landscape for something as basic as buying and selling.

But on the other hand, should we even be trying to bring people deeper than USDT, or is it enough to simply allow them to buy an Avalanche card) for everyday purchases?

“I still consider myself a beginner”

This is the self-assessment of people familiar with centralized exchanges, aware of decentralization (but not using its “benefits”), and attempting to invest in crypto assets. Again, there’s no correlation with educational level — these people are diverse. Almost none of them have ventured beyond AAVE (which TVL kind of backs up). Some still don’t know they can avoid Ethereum’s high fees, let alone where to check them, but every single one struggles with protocol interfaces. Each protocol feels different, making it unclear what to do, creating fear of further action, and leading to a halt in engagement — a literal quote from an employee at a crypto venture fund.

It’s hard to blame protocols for not caring about user-friendliness since such issues are solved by standardization. But imagining a standardized web and mobile interface for crypto protocols is a stretch right now. And none of them know how to check their transaction status: why it’s pending for hours, whether the funds are lost, or where to get support (nowhere). Almost no one knows about block explorers. And if they’ve heard of them, they don’t know where to find them. Should I even mention that finding links to these explorers without falling for phishing is no easy task?

A simple, obvious idea confirmed by my experience is that the fewer extra steps needed to reach a goal, the more likely it is for someone to achieve it. CJM currently resembles that infamous funnel, where Vitalik seems to sit at the bottom.

For instance, for these people, “Stake ETH to support network security” is meaningless. To make sense, you need to understand PoS consensus, which means understanding why consensus even matters?

The sad truth is that even “beginners” who look advanced to real newbies are still exit liquidity. At worst, these “beginners” simply lose access to their funds. One of my clients panicked after Fuel Network created a second wallet linked to her MetaMask account; she thought she had lost her money. It leads me to think the current crypto industry is simply a TradFi tool, one people are invited to enter, make money, or, in the best case, break even, and leave back to TradFi. This might actually be the case, considering I still can’t buy sausage with Bitcoin in Europe. Is that bad? No. Is someone to blame? Hard to say because buying sausage with crypto requires a clear green light from the government. Enthusiasts and developers alone can’t make it happen. Yet, despite the talk of borderless transactions and tokenization of the a sausage, this aspect gets surprisingly little attention in the industry, even though it could genuinely improve people’s lives.

Advanced Users — Myth or Reality?

This question, of course, is a way to highlight the toxic situation where people in the industry tend to see each other as either idiots or, at best, as novices. Advanced users in the crypto industry are, essentially, those with a full specialization. Everyone I consider “advanced” earns a living in the industry one way or another: algo-traders, analysts, developers, and others who abuse use various earning mechanisms (sybils, node operators, degens etc.).

Interestingly, they split into two types: highly empathetic and highly toxic. And the reason is simple — the massive gap between the beginner in the previous paragraph and the advanced user in this one. The toxic ones don’t feel like helping beginners bridge this gap, while only the highly empathetic are able to explain what’s going on. People in the crypto industry often help each other a lot. On the other hand, I saw a chat where you could get banned just for asking a question like “What’s the difference between staking and liquid staking?”

For these individuals, becoming advanced took years of study and varying amounts of money spent. Yet, even “advanced” is a relative term in tech — one might be advanced in analyzing crypto project business models, but one wrong move and they’re exit liquidity in meme coins or a victim of an MEV attack. Even rushing can make you fall for a phishing address in your transaction history.

Security in crypto, by the way, deserves a post of its own. On top of all the complexities I’ve written about above, soon the poor user will have to face questions of security and fund protection. And this challenge never loses relevance, regardless of skill level. Once, I even heard a story about a private key being stolen by monitoring screen emissions. But these are just musings; it’s a conceptual issue in the industry: more freedom = more responsibility.

In practical terms, based on our onboarding experience, I’d consider a user advanced when they start regularly using a non-custodial wallet. By coincidence, these people also navigate protocols well and don’t get lost in specialized technologies like Uni V3’s narrow range. After this point, a right-skewed distribution starts: the level of advancement goes much further than any level of ignorance. Roughly speaking, it takes 3–6 months of focused study to understand all the basic concepts in the industry, while reaching skill limits and understanding details can take much longer. This seems to be what divides people into highly toxic or highly empathetic.

Incidentally, 3–6 months isn’t just a number. It’s how long it took for a former banker to immerse themselves in crypto concepts.

What Was My Point?

It might seem I’m being critical or skeptical. Locally, perhaps yes, but globally I get that it is what it is, and there’s no way I can just go to Avalanche’s customer success department and ask them to “make it simpler.” What I want to draw attention to is the contradictory nature of the situation. Many in the industry are waiting for retail liquidity to flood in — mass adoption. This, it seems, is what should drive Bitcoin up to millions and billions of dollars, or ease regulatory pressure, or safeguard people’s assets from bank errors or abuse. Basically, there are a range of reasons from different stakeholders — crypto investors, crypto-anarchists, and plain cosmopolitans. However, the situation turns absurd — mass adoption can’t happen when even a basic user onboarding funnel is nowhere to be found, not even on the home pages of L2s that are supposedly here to improve users’ lives. Funny thing, this mission usually falls on the shoulders of regular users (or YouTubers). The majority of newcomers are stuck on centralized exchanges, which only loosely connect to the ideals of blockchain and decentralization. And while beginners are bogged down on CEXs, the decentralized space remains a subcategory of TradFi because it’s a self-fulfillment playground for highly skilled users with plenty of free time.

Telegram tried to attract traffic through airdrops and TG miniapps for interactive immersion. It’s better than nothing, but it has led to two issues:

1. The whole immersion is limited to the TON ecosystem (hopefully, for now).

2. A huge crowd of people (131 million) ended up disappointed by the Hamster Kombat airdrop, becoming victims of the “crypto is a scam” narrative.

One of the funniest drivers for mass adoption I’ve seen is the call to study Bitcoin. This is undoubtedly a great practice, but firstly, there was one political theory from the mid-19th century that was also touted as a gateway to a brighter future (and of course, the masses never studied it). Secondly, I bet people are more likely to buy Bitcoin as a joke, influenced by CT, than after reading the whitepaper. Here, I urge a bit of realism.

I don’t know if we even need mass adoption, or if the entire industry is simply a quirky way of redistributing wealth. Or maybe we do need it, but developers are currently scratching their heads, wondering how to explain to a store owner in Alabama why it would be cool for them to keep funds in Rabby Wallet rather than a bank. For now, the positioning of the crypto industry with a goal of mass adoption feels completely out of touch. Money transactions — the most routine action in our lives — shouldn’t create so much cognitive load and demand so much time.

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