Most Users have been complaining that wallets like MetaMask need to be more user-friendly, And they are not wrong. Most wallets feel like they were created for developers. That’s becoming a bigger problem in terms of both practicality and security as crypto adoption increases.
After Ethereum’s long-awaited Merge, it’s an ideal time to think about how we can also improve smart contracts. Essentially apps that run on blockchains, and smart contracts are a vital component of our Web3 applications. But interacting with them remains quite dangerous. especially for non-developers. Many of the incidents where users lose their crypto assets are caused by buggy or malicious smart contracts.
As a Web3 app developer, this is a challenge I think about often. especially as waves of new users keep onboarding into various blockchain applications. To fully trust a smart contract, a consumer needs to know exactly what it’s going to do when they make a transaction.
because unlike in the Web2 world, there’s no customer support hotline to call and recover funds if something goes wrong. But currently, it’s nearly impossible to know if a smart contract is safe or trustworthy.
One solution is to make wallets themselves smarter. For instance, what if wallets could tell us if a smart contract is safe to interact with? It’s probably impossible to know that with 100% certainty. but wallets could, at minimum, aggregate and display a lot of the signals that developers already look for. This would make the process simpler and safer, especially for non-developers.
Here’s a deeper look at the advantages and disadvantages of smart contracts, why they seem like the Wild West now, and how we might improve the UX for using them.
The promise of smart contracts
For developers, using a smart contract as the backend for their app has enormous potential. It also increases the potential for bugs and exploits. It’s great that smart contracts can be created by developers without asking anybody for permission. but that can also expose users to considerable risk. We now have apps transacting hundreds of millions of dollars with no safety guarantees. As it stands, we simply have to trust that these apps are bug-free and do what they promise.
Many non-developers aren’t even aware of the safety issues involved. they take the appropriate precautions when interacting with blockchain-based apps. The average user might sign a transaction thinking it’s going to do one thing, only to discover the smart contract does something else entirely. It’s why malicious smart contracts are a primary attack vector for bad actors.
Why are smart contracts the Wild West?
When a Web3 app makes a smart contract call, you don’t know exactly what the transaction will do until you actually do it. Will it mint your nonfungible token (NFT), or will it send your money and tokens to a hacker? This unpredictability is true of any online application, of course, not just Web3 apps; predicting what code will do is very hard. But it’s a bigger issue in the Web3 world since most of these apps are inherently high stakes (they’re built for handling your money), and there’s so little protection for consumers.
The App Store is largely safe due to Apple’s review process. but that doesn’t exist in Web3. If an iOS app starts stealing users’ money, Apple will take it down right away to mitigate losses and revoke the account of its creator.
The UX of wallets and smart contracts today
In many ways, wallets like MetaMask feel like they were created for developers. They display a lot of deep technical details and blockchain minutiae that are useful when building apps. The problem with that is that non-developers also use MetaMask — without understanding what everything means. Nobody expected Web3 to go mainstream so quickly, and wallets haven’t quite caught up with the needs of their new user base.
Toward a safer future
In the future, there will likely be many safety-focused tools built on the primitive components that blockchains provide. For instance, it’s likely we’ll see insurance protocols that protect users from buggy smart contracts become commonplace. (These exist already, but they’re still fairly niche.)
However, consumers are already using Web3 apps. even in these early days, so I’d love to see the dev community add more protections for them now. Some simple improvements to wallets could go a long way. Some of the aforementioned ideas would help protect inexperienced users. while simultaneously streamlining the transaction process for Web3 veterans.
From my perspective, anything outside of trading crypto assets on Coinbase (or other big companies.) is still far too risky for the average consumer. When friends and family ask about setting up a self-custody crypto wallet to use Web3 apps .(let’s face it — usually, in order to buy NFTs), always start by warning them of the risks. This scares some of them away, but the more determined people want to use them anyway. When our wallets are smarter, we’ll be able to feel much better about onboarding the next wave of new users to Web3.
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