Jesse Pollak, who leads Base at Coinbase, has been direct about what the next phase of crypto requires. A million developers, a billion users. That goal assumes the current onboarding experience is a structural ceiling — not just an inconvenience.
He is right. And the ceiling is not where most teams think it is.
Most onboarding discussions in Web3 focus on wallet friction: the install step, the seed phrase, the gas requirement. Those are real problems. But fixing them does not fix onboarding.
Web3 asks users to trust a system that repeatedly tells them not to trust anyone. That contradiction is what the interface has to resolve.
The documented failure nobody fixed fast enough
In 2022, a researcher documented the MetaMask onboarding flow step by step:
1. Install extension
2. Create password
3. Write down 12-word seed phrase
4. Confirm seed phrase by retyping it in random order
5. Figure out how to get ETH for gas
6. Navigate to the app
7. Connect wallet
8. Encounter popup showing 0x095ea7b30000...
9. Decide whether to sign
Nine steps before the first real action. No explanation of what a seed phrase is. No indication of what gas costs. No preview of what happens after connection.
The team knew. The fixes were slow because no one owned the failure. Protocol teams own the contracts. Wallet teams own the wallet. App teams own the app. Nobody owns the experience across all three — and the user experiences all of it.
The Coinbase bet
Brian Armstrong built Coinbase around a single conviction: if crypto feels like a bank, more people will use it. The onboarding — email, password, KYC, buy button — deliberately mirrors a fintech product.
The insight is not that users want to be deceived. It is that users want to start somewhere familiar before going somewhere unfamiliar.
Coinbase Wallet and Base are now trying to extend this to self-custody. The bet: if the first self-custody experience is as legible as a Venmo transfer, millions of users who stopped at the MetaMask install screen will continue past it.
The counterargument from the protocol side
Andre Cronje has been the most consistent voice against polished onboarding in DeFi. His argument: if your UI hides what the contract is doing, users are taking risk they do not understand.
He is not entirely wrong.
A well-designed onboarding flow on top of a predatory contract is a liability, not good UX. There are documented cases where polished interfaces lowered guard at exactly the wrong moment.
But this is an argument for honest design, not minimal design.
The answer to "pretty UIs hide risk" is not "build ugly UIs." It is to design interfaces where risk is legible before the signature — not buried inside a tooltip the user never opens.
What the wallet popup reveals about your product
Most teams design up to the wallet interaction — then mentally hand off responsibility to MetaMask, Phantom, or WalletConnect.
That is a mistake.
What most apps show before a signature
[Connect Wallet]
What they should show before a signature
You are approving USDC spending — up to $500
This does not move funds yet.
You can revoke this permission later in your wallet settings.
[Approve in wallet →]
And after the signature
✓ Approval confirmed
You can now deposit into the ETH pool.
Gas used: ~$2.40
Vitalik Buterin has written about this tension: the "self-sovereign way of using Ethereum" — managing your own keys, verifying your own transactions — should have better UX than it currently does. Not simpler in the sense of removing user agency. Better in the sense of making that agency feel manageable.
The wallet popup is part of your product even though you do not control it. Design around it.
The structural reason this is still broken
VC capital in crypto flows toward protocols, not interfaces.
A new yield mechanism raises $15M. The onboarding flow that sits in front of it gets two weeks from a contractor before launch.
Founders are told: ship protocol first, UX later. But later rarely comes. By the time the protocol is stable, the competitor with the same confusing interface has half the market — and there is no longer a business case for rebuilding from scratch.
The projects that bucked this — Phantom, Rainbow, Coinbase Wallet — did so because someone treated the onboarding experience as infrastructure, not polish. They owned the gap between wallet and app before users fell into it.
What this means practically
The connect button is a trust boundary, not a CTA. Treat it like a bank authorization — frame it, explain it, reassure before and confirm after.
State requirements before failure. Chain, gas, token balance, wallet type — say it before the error message does.
Design around the wallet popup. Label the action in plain language before it opens. Confirm what changed after it closes.
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Specific risk beats generic warning.
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DeFi involves risk - ✅
Withdrawals lock for 7 days after deposit
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Own the gap. The experience between your app and the wallet is yours. No one else will fix it.
The onboarding problem in Web3 is not a wallet problem. Wallets have gotten better. The problem is that teams still hand users a sharp object and assume they know what to do with it.
The interface is the trust layer. Build it like it matters.
I work as a Web3 creative director helping crypto teams turn complex products into interfaces people can trust and use. somaryuu.xyz
