Most people (the other 99%) don’t speak crypto. They’ve never managed a seed phrase or set up a Web3 wallet, and frankly, they shouldn’t have to. Yet too many Web3 apps today seem built for the crypto-savvy elite, not the everyday user. It’s telling that while over 560 million people worldwide now use cryptocurrency, billions more stand on the sidelines, put off by complicated interactions and clunky interfaces. If Web3 is ever to achieve mainstream success, we need to stop designing for the 1% who understand crypto and start building for the 99% who don’t.

Feel Like Web2

End-users shouldn’t need a crash course in cryptography to use an application. They just want something that works. After all, most people don’t ask whether their favorite app runs on AWS or Google Cloud – the underlying tech is irrelevant to their experience.

Blockchain should be no different: it should be powerful and essentially invisible in the user experience. Managing wallet keys, seed phrases, gas fees – all that complexity is simply too much for the average person and must be swept out of sight for Web3 to benefit everyday users . In practice, that means abstracting away the arcane bits and focusing on what the user actually cares about: a smooth, enjoyable journey to get done what they came to do.

As developers and end-users of Web3, we have learned first-hand that good UX is a necessity. We’ve banged our heads against confusing dApps ourselves. We’ve watched brilliant blockchain projects falter because normal people find them unusable. The truth is, complexity is a silent adoption killer. A recent industry report found that 43% of would-be crypto users shy away from the technical tangle of private keys and gas fees, and over $200 billion in crypto has been lost forever due to forgotten seed phrases. Think about that: hundreds of billions gone, because of bad UX. Those aren’t just statistics – they’re real people, real money, and real confidence lost because using a Web3 app felt like defusing a bomb. For us, outcomes like that are unacceptable. It’s a clear sign that we as builders have to do better.

So what does “doing better” look like? Well..make web3 feel effortless. It means designing apps where the blockchain is under the hood, not constantly in the user’s face.

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The Jargon

The average person doesn’t know what “signing a transaction” or “RPC endpoint” means, and hitting them with acronyms and Web3 slang is a sure way to send them running. So we speak plain language. For example, rather than a button that says “Deploy Smart Contract” we’ll simply say “Save” or “Submit” depending on context.

If a dApp would normally say “Insufficient GAS,” we might label it “Network fee required” – or better yet, design it so the user rarely sees that message at all. It sounds obvious, but swapping cryptic terms for familiar words is a game changer. Even something as simple as calling a “wallet address” an “account number” in the UI can put a user at ease. As one observer noted recently, simply changing “gas fees” to “transaction costs” is a good start toward making ordinary users feel at home . We’ve found this to be true in practice.

When we built an NFT marketplace for a client, we avoided the term “NFT” in the consumer-facing copy – we talked about “collectibles” and “items” instead. As a result, users who had zero blockchain background felt more comfortable because the app talked like a normal app, not an academic paper. Our philosophy is that clarity wins. We’re not dumbing things down; we’re respecting the user’s perspective.

The goal is for someone’s mom or dad to use the product without feeling stupid. That starts with language that welcomes them rather than alienates them.

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Hide the Wallet (pls)

Imagine downloading a music app and the first thing it asks is to configure your IP routing or set up a database – you’d nope out fast. That's what we’ve been doing in Web3.

We’ve learned to do the opposite. Whenever possible, we design onboarding flows that delay or hide the “wallet” complexity until absolutely necessary. In some projects, we’ve implemented a kind of “walletless onboarding.” The idea is simple: let users start using the app first, show them value, and only then introduce the crypto stuff. This approach echoes what others in the industry are finding: you can abstract away the blockchain under the hood by creating a custodial account for the user initially, so they don’t have to worry about wallet setup right off the bat . The result? Far less drop-off. People actually make it through the door and experience the product, instead of bouncing at the “please connect your wallet” page.

Hiding complexity doesn’t mean sacrificing decentralization or security – it means being smart about when and how you expose it. In our projects, advanced users can always dive under the hood if they want: link an external wallet, export their keys, etc. But for everyone else, the crypto bits stay invisible until needed. We also employ techniques like preconfiguring gas or covering transaction fees during onboarding, so that a newcomer isn’t confronted with a Metamask popup asking them to set a gas price. (Nothing makes a new user panic like a strange dialog about spending ETH they don’t even have!) If grandma wants to start yield farming, she shouldn’t need her tech-whiz grandson beside her to make it work.

Yes, there’s amazing tech under the hood – smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, you name it – but the user doesn’t need a tour of the engine. They just need a smooth ride. As one commentator put it, technical complexity has to be swept under the rug and UIs should be so familiar that even your grandmother could use them . We couldn’t agree more.

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Onboarding

Another huge lesson we’ve learned is to meet users where they already are.

That means leveraging the sign-in and payment methods people already use, rather than forcing them into wholly new ones. For onboarding, we often integrate social login options or single sign-on. If a user can log into a dApp with a Google account or an email link, it feels as familiar as signing into Netflix – and that’s exactly the point. Under the hood, yes, a wallet is being created, keys might be split and stored securely, magic is happening – but the user doesn’t need to know. They just hit “Sign in with Google” and boom, they’re in.

Solutions like Web3Auth and others have made this seamless: social login flows can be indistinguishable from a typical Web2 login, greatly improving onboarding for mainstream users .

The same goes for payments and onboarding new value into a Web3 app. Expecting a first-time user to already have crypto in a wallet is just unrealistic. So we prioritize integrating fiat onramps – the ability to use a credit card, Apple Pay, or bank transfer right inside the app to purchase whatever token or credit is needed. In one of our recent builds, when a user wanted to buy an NFT ticket, we gave them a familiar “Pay with card” option alongside the crypto option. Guess what most people chose? The card, of course.

It allows people not familiar with crypto to enter the Web3 ecosystem using traditional payment methods . In practice, that might mean a user can click “Buy with USD,” charge their Visa card, and our app converts it to the necessary tokens behind the scenes. To the user, it’s a simple online purchase like any other. No exchanges, no manual wallet top-ups, no asking a friend how to get ETH. Just instant access. Every extra step or hurdle costs us users, so we try to remove as many as possible.

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Design

Perhaps most importantly, we design product flows that feel native to what users already know.

If you can get a user to say, “Huh, this doesn’t feel like a blockchain app at all – it just feels like a good app,” then you’re on the right track.

If we’re building a marketplace dApp, we’ll include the same kind of smooth product search, shopping cart, and checkout flow that users expect on any e-commerce site. If we’re building a social dApp, we’ll make the posting and sharing flow as close to a regular social network as possible. The Web3 magic (ownership, verifiability, whatever the case) operates behind the scenes to enhance the experience, not to complicate it. We strive for flows where the blockchain bits are under the hood and the front-end experience feels culturally familiar.

For example, when a user completes an action in one of our dApps, we don’t immediately throw a JSON transaction hash at them as “proof of completion” (looking at you, many DeFi UIs). Instead, we might say “Success! Your item is now owned by you,” and tuck away the technical details in an advanced view or email receipt. By making Web3 interactions resemble patterns people already trust, we reduce the intimidation factor dramatically.

The blockchain features become a bonus, not a barrier. When done right, using a Web3 app can feel as easy as using Gmail, with the added benefit that the user actually controls their data or assets. That’s the holy grail: the average person enjoys the app for what it does, unaware that under the hood it’s a decentralized marvel. To get there, we have to bury the complexity and let the familiar UX shine.

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The Way Forward

After countless hours building dApps and even more hours acting as guinea pigs for other projects, one conviction has crystalized for our team: Web3 will only go mainstream when it stops feeling like “Web3.”

Success in this space isn’t about touting how novel or technical your product is; it’s about making an app so intuitive and useful that users may not even realize it’s powered by blockchain – and they shouldn’t have to. The invisible infrastructure approach is already proven in Web2 (think about how nobody needs to understand SMTP to benefit from email).

Now it’s our turn in Web3 to do the same: make the infrastructure **powerful but invisible , and put people front and center. At Buidly, we’ve nailed down this ethos through real-world projects and plenty of trial and error. We’ve seen the difference it makes when you put user experience first, and we’re not turning back.

Our hope is that more builders in the blockchain community will join us in focusing on the other 99%. Let’s trade the complexity arms-race for a usability arms-race. Let’s remember that for the vast majority of people, if it’s not easy and intuitive, it simply won’t matter how revolutionary it is under the hood.

If you’re a founder, developer, or organization who shares this vision of a user-first Web3, we’d love to hear from you. Buidly is on a mission to make decentralized technology accessible to everyone, and we’re looking to partner with others who feel the same. If you're buidling any blockchain-based product, let’s collaborate to hide the complexity and highlight the value for users. The future of Web3 belongs to those who build for the masses, not just the crypto natives. Together, we can finally break the crypto bubble and deliver apps that everyone loves to use.

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