The Legos Of Building Better Onchain Experiences

From ifeoluwani by Ifeoluwani

A couple of months back, I wrote an  article  contextualizing why we don't see many mainstream crypto apps beyond wallets and exchanges. The gist? It took a while to build the infrastructure needed to make the vision of onchain apps and products a reality.

Even now, onchain apps often have a measure of complexity that is still too tedious for the average consumer, especially in a world where attention is fleeting and the opportunity cost for time spent on any one activity can feel steep ⎯ there’s usually something else that’s pretty entertaining or rewarding that you could be doing.

Now, none of this is exactly new news.

But I ended that article talking about how recent developments like Smart Wallets and Paymaster APIs for gas sponsorships are making it easier to build more accessible onchain experiences. I want to follow up on that more here and map out the kind of experiences possible today, and why we should be excited about a fully onchain ecosystem of products. I'll be largely focusing on Base, as it's the ecosystem I'm currently most tuned into.

1. Smart Wallets:

Wallets have historically been a major friction point in bringing people onchain. There were just so many steps to setting up a wallet that many people inevitably dropped off:

For most newcomers, this process typically required handholding - you likely needed someone in the know to help you figure out the moving parts and fund your wallet.

Smart wallets have changed this game. With them, apps can offer secure, non-custodial wallet addresses that users control through their device passkey. Essentially, that first big hurdle for new users coming onchain? It's been smoothed out significantly.

2. Session Keys:

Another major cause of friction with crypto products is multiple clicks for wallet approvals. If you've been in crypto for a while, you might not even notice it anymore, but for newcomers, this is another thing that tends to create friction. It's distracting and takes users out of the product experience at hand.

Enter Session Keys. With these, users can pre-approve a transaction limit for an app, allowing it to sign transactions within that limit without interruptions.

This is huge because it opens up a whole new world of use-cases. Now we can have transactions running in the background, like subscriptions and a bunch of other cool stuff.

FYI: session keys are currently live only on Base Sepolia and should hit mainnet soon.

3. Paymasters:

Paymasters are the development that's finally allowing crypto to offer a better experience when it comes to gas fees - a major turn-off for many would-be users. With L2s like Base, gas fees are already way cheaper, and Paymaster APIs mean apps can now sponsor gas fees for their users.

What Will Be Built With These Legos?

There’s often so much happening in crypto with one infra project or the other getting a lot of hype, constant talk about price movements, etc. that it can be sometimes tricky to get a grasp of where things actually are if you aren’t actively following developments. But right now, we're at a point where users don't need to navigate the classic wallet setup, manually approve every transaction, or even pay gas fees to use an onchain app.

And this has me absolutely pumped. The basic tools we need to build much better experiences - ones that can onboard and keep millions of people - are now in place. We can build an ecosystem of interconnected products onchain. Imagine not needing to off-ramp to USD for a purchase because there are just as good and even better product alternatives right there onchain.

The legos are ready, and I think there is a duty for every good actor in the space to amplify the narratives around useful products for consumers because we need to correct the notion the average person holds about crypto for a new set of users to come onchain.

The multiple projects that exist now are largely competing for the same set of crypto-native users and the best way to assure growth is a wider change in focus towards apps now possible to build for everyday users with the tools at hand.

Here’s  an amazing article from Yele of Onboard Protocol suggesting some useful products that can be built onchain today, and if you are a developer with an idea you’d like to flesh out, a great place to start is with Base’s  Onchain Kit.