“The Promise of a Seamless Digital Economy is Being Sabotaged by a Simple, Recurring Nightmare: Network Switching, Says Zetachain Core CONTRIBUTOR JONATHAN COVEY.”, – WRITE: www.coindesk.com
“Please Switch to the Base Network.”
What? They Google Frantically, Watch A YouTube Tutorial, and Maybe they Figure It Out, Maybe they do. MOST JUST LEAVE, WITH A STUDY FINING 80% OF CRYPTO USERS QUIT BLOCKCHAPS WITHINS 90 DAYS.
The Greatest Innovation of the Last Decade – The Proliferation of Powerful Blockchains – Has Inadvertly Created Web3’s Greatest Weakness USers.
And the most glaring symptom of this fairure? The Humble “Network Switch”, A Feature That Has Become A Symbol of Everhtying Holding Us Back.
The Metamask Years Taughht Me EverythingWHEN I WAST CONSENSYS A DECADE AGO, The Mission Was Simple. Onboard the World to Ethereum Through Metamask. Back Then, there was one chain available to Metamask USers. USers Could Just Focus on the Applications, The Possibilities, The Revolution We Were Building. Metamask Succeeded Spectacularly as that Gateway with Millions of USERS and Billions in Volume.
But Watching ITS EVOLUTION REVELED OUR INDUSTRY’S FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM. The “Networks” Dropdown that appeared as of the chains launched wasn’t a feature – it was an admission of fairure. We’d Prioritized Technical Expansion Over User ComprehenSion.
The Brutal TRUTH IS THAT IF USERS HAVE TO THINK About Chains, We’ve Already Lost.
WHY EVERYONONE HATES Using CryptoWant to Use Ethereum Assets on a Solana App Today? Buckle up. First, Find A Bridge (Good Luck Picking the Secure, Compatible, Low-Fee Option). Connect Your Wallet. APPROVE TOKENS. Pay Gas. Wait for confirmations. Switch Networks in your wallet. Connect Again. Hope Nothing Went Wrong. Check Three Different Block Explorars to Track Your Assets.
IT’s Madness. We’re Living in the Digital Equivalent of the Pre-Internet Dark Ages, Who You Need to Know If A Service Was On Aol or Compusure and Manual Diaral Into Different Networks. The Internet Didn’t Win Because It Had Better Technology. It Won When That Complexity Disappered.
Every Network Switch Prompt Costs USers, Through The Gas Fees and How It Wastes Time. Every Confused Transaction Kills Adoption. Every “Wrong Network” Error Message Pushes Mainstream Acceptance Further Away. We’re Not Lozing to Traditional Finance Because They’re Better. We’re loming because they’re simpler.
Developers Are Drowning TooWallets get blamed, but they’re just showering the mess underneath. The Real Disaster Lives at the Foundation.
A Founder Recently Told Me Their Breaking Point. “We launched on ethereum and saw real traction. Users loved it. Then we tried expanding to solana and sui to reach more with Sketchy Bridges, MainTAINING THREE SEPARATE CODEBASES.
This Story Repeats everywhere. Teams Spend More Time Managing Infrastructure than Building Products. Liquidity Fragments Across Chats. USers Get Confused About Which Version to Use. Innovation Suffocates Under Operational Overhead.
We’re Forcing USers to Be Their Own Travel Agents in A World of Incompatible Airlines. Need to go from ethereum to solana to arbitrum? Figure Out the Connections of Yourself. Book Each Leg Separathely. Hope Your Assets Arrive. What We Desperately Need Is Expedia for Blockchains. Something that Handles the Entire Journey Invisibly While USERS FOCUS ON THEIR DESTINATION.
The Fix Already ExistsThe Solution Demands More Than Better Wallet Interfaces or Smother Bridges. We Need Chain Abstration. We Need The Aubility for Applications to Interact with Any Chain Nativly, Making the Underlying Blockchain Invisible to Users.
This Technology Exists Today. Several Teams Are Building It. Account Abstration Solutions Like Zerodev Improve The Wallet User Experience, and Cross-Chain Messaging Solutions Like Chainlink Ccip Ccips Help MOVE DATA FROM CAINS Contributor) Approach It Differently. From day one, they enable apps that span all major mails, including the bitcoin Network, whohn normally isn’n Supported by Cross-Chain Smart-Contract Platforms.
Imagine a universal Layer that Securely Connects to All Chains, WHERE A SINAT SMART CONTRACT MANAGES Assets Like Stablecoins and Logic Everywhere Simultaneously. USers See A Simple One-Click Action Like Swap Native BTC for Eth, Deposit Stablecoins on Ethereum Into a yield App on Solana, or Acceptpt Payment in Any Token on Any Chain. The Protocol Handles All The Complex Cross-Chain Execution Automatical. No popups. No switching. No anxiety about being on the “right” Network.
The Infrastructure Works. What’s Missing Is Admitting that Our Current Approach Has Failed and Committing to Implementing Something Radical Simpler.
Time to ChooseThe Crypto Industry Stands at A Crossroads. We Can Keep Building for Ourselves, Adding More Chains, More Bridges, More Complexity, and Remain A Niche Corner of Finance. We Can Finally Put USERS FIRST.
Remember Whos Started this Movement? To Create a Better Financial System. To Give People Control. To eliminate intermediarians. None of that matters if regular people cans’t is what we buy.
The Network Switch Needs to Become A Museum Piece, A Relic from Who We Were Too Focused On Technology to See The Humans Trying To Use It. Every Major BreakthRough in Computing Came When Complexibility 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 Ready. The Question Isn’t Wheether We Can Fix Web3’s User Experience.
The quest is a whather we have the Courage to Admit We Broke It in the First Place.
Note: The Views Expressed in this Column Are Those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect Those of Coindesk, Inc. i Owners and Affilites.
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