What’s in Your Wallet(s): User experience. That’s what drives adoption. AirBnB, Uber, Square – adoption surged with a better, cheaper user experience for homes, cars, and payments. All of those were disruptive to existing players, and users didn’t shed a tear. Why should crypto assets be any different? The number of worldwide blockchain users has increased 26.8% per annum in the past five years to nearly 100 million. The numbers aren’t quite chatGPT, but they are impressive by any other lens. There are only fourteen countries with more than 100 million people for context – it’s a real number. Wallet as a Service (WaaS) aims to make it even easier to adopt decentralized rails. Easier to create a wallet. Easier to maintain self-sovereignty. Easier to avoid singular points of failure. Venmo, a payment provider, is expanding its capacity in the “easier” department, too. With payment volumes of more than $240 billion and 78 million users, crypto asset holders will be able to transfer funds to outside wallets. Including “unhosted” wallets. Regulators are right to be anxious about unhosted wallets. Enter the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which comes along to say that the travel rules for money must also apply to crypto assets. It isn’t damning – it’s ratification in crypto. The finalization of Europe’s comprehensive crypto asset framework integrated unhosted wallets into the travel rule, requiring screens for both the sender and recipient of funds more than $1,000. Of course, unhosted wallets aren’t the problem. The vast majority of economic flows around those wallets are tied to regulated entities. Financial regulation can slow things down. User experience will keep things marching forward. We’ll all have wallets soon enough – and so will our bots.
The information contained herein is not a recommendation or endorsement of any digital asset, protocol, network, or project.