story time: i love the magic of onchain payments, esp. for products & services like rotki, venice.ai, SimpleLogin, just to name a few (vendors, more of this pls!). but cross-chain UX as it stands is effortful at best and untenable at worst. expecting broad adoption at this moment is comedic gold.
some vendors, like rotki, independently figure out their payment processing. others like venice.ai and SimpleLogin take the coinbase-commerce route, which, for the moment, definitely seems like the broadly adopted solution for more established offerings. that’s all fine-and-dandy until you get to the payments screen. the cognitive load — even for me, your average onchain plebeian — is TAXING (mi’lord).
from a UX perspective, these offerings presume some pretty steep prerequisites from the user:
- 😵💫 know which tokens/chains you have & are on
- 😵💫 know which tokens/chains the vendor accepts
- 😵💫 know how to circumnavigate across chains/assets to get to the target asset
properly secured self-custody is alrdy a mega ask. now we want to levy on another one by getting users to navigate cross-chain? 😂 LOL talk about reading the room. trust me when I say this. most users, i.e. me, just want you to take our damn $$ so we can get to the product itself. if there’s too many steps in between, 9/10 times I am alrdy moving on. that’s a missed acquisition of the extremely onchain for:
- ❌ your product
- ❌ your community
- ❌ crucial product feedback
- ❌ your bottom line
gg no re
p.s. this kinda happened to me with gitcoin once
some services definitely do it better than others, e.g. ilike rotki’s classic method for picking from THEIR list of networks/tokens & generating an addy for me to send to. but you really have to be a masochist otherwise when you want to obtain an asset (for payments) in a fee-conscious way. now if you’re a product and you’re trying to appeal to your avg crypto holder? im telling you… NO SHOT. they’ll default to tradFi.
a sidebar: i have friends that still have never done anything off of mainnet (let alone ON mainnet) cuz the cross-chain UX is an absolute clusterfuck. if I extrapolate my friends as the average holder & further extrapolate their gumption for cross-chain, that’s gotta be idle capital in the excess of HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS 💸
😢 the sad part is the missed opportunities for them to experience the magic of onchain. even bigger is the missed opp for building a thriving onchain economy (outside of defi).
while some protocols (e.g. everclear (formerly connext) and across + honourable mention for my darling sygma) make the prospect of getting to the target asset much easier… it’s still a heavy cognitive load for most users besides the most native of onchain natives.
which lands us in the present day with chain abstraction™ being the latest buzz. the word of the gospel says:
“abstract away thy notion of chains and networks, and thou shallst get to the heart of the thing”
otherwise known as ➡️ input action X, ➡️ output result Y
it’s why we need projects like sprinter, the latest joint effort from the sygma and chainsafe teams. the mandate is simple: meet the users where they are (app/product level), minimize the cognitive load, and provide a seamless path for payments:
- ✅ unify token balances
- ✅ sus out optimal execution paths for a user’s target asset/needs
- ✅ one signature
- ✅ remove the need to switch networks
👆 i promise you when i was paying for rotki, venice.ai, SimpleLogin, etc. i had to do all of that on my own.
use sprinter.
i’d like to see these hypotheticals come to reality:
1️⃣ product costs $50 USDC. user has USDC spread out across multiple chains — user has no idea where. route user the fastest/most cost-efficient way to paying $50 USDC with multi-chain USDC, to the target chain. confirm.
2️⃣ same scenario above. except maybe user doesn’t have enough/any USDC. route user the fastest/most cost-efficient way to swapping to $50 USDC, using multi-chain/multi-assets. confirm.
3️⃣ Same scenario above. Except maybe even across multiple wallets? someone tell me if this is even possible?
we’re moving in the right direction. the early stage focus on infra made sense when blockspace was still a rare commodity. now let’s turn our heads to the users.
because it’s high time we stop ignoring the application layer — in effect, the users.
keep a close eye on sprinter as it progresses 👇
