The 3 barriers preventing Web3 mass adoption
Web3 has a conversion rate issue (if you have friends in marketing, you may have heard this term before).
A conversion is essentially the process of someone going from a 'non-user' to a 'user,' of a product or service.
When a product is too hard to understand, too hard to use, too hard to purchase (or all of the above), these barriers lower its conversion rate.
Higher conversion rates = faster adoption.
Trust Wallet CEO, Eowyn Chen, has spent a lot of time thinking about Web3's many and varying 'conversion barriers,' and identified the three main roadblocks standing in the way of mass adoption.
She recently went over them at the Australian Crypto Convention:
Ease of use.
This is a big one. For any new technology to take over, it can't just be better at a few things, when compared with what came before it.
It has to be better across the board (and this includes ease of use).
Easy account set up, automated currency conversions, consistent/affordable transaction fees and a wide variety of places to spend/trade cryptocurrencies (both online and IRL) will first be needed, in order for true mass-adoption to be achieved.
Security.
Do you know how to read the code of a smart contract? Me Neither.
You might click 'connect wallet' on a website that says it wants to send you a free NFT...but it's actually going to strip you of all of your tokens / NFTs once connected.
The only way to vet these kinds of transactions (at this point) is to read the code of the smart contract running it.
Automated verification will need to exist before many users to feel comfortable adopting this new technology.
Privacy & Identity.
How do you verify your identity, while retaining some level of privacy?
If you send money to a bank account, the person sending it will know your account name/number, but they won't be able to see how much money its holding. With cryptocurrency, they can see and track it all.
For both users and law makers to accept blockchain technology en masse, a balance needs to be struck somewhere between complete transparency and ultimate anonymity.
E.g. a coin with complete public privacy, that can be toggled to allow tax auditors to view/verify transaction histories.
Being the CEO of one of the world's largest wallet providers puts E-Chen in a great position to tackle these sorts of problems.
...and the timeline she envisions for the industry to tackle these issues?
2024 (very exciting!).
