Bringing the first billion mainstream cryptocurrency adopters on the blockchain will first require more beginner-friendly applications.
The current user onboarding process is complicated and riddled with friction points, which is the main issue for mass crypto adoption, according to Chintan Turakhia, senior director of engineering at Coinbase.
Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph at EthCC, Turakhia said:
“If our goal is to bring in the next billion users — and let’s start with just 100 million — we have to take all those friction points out.”
Some of the most pressing friction points include the necessity of setting up a wallet with a complicated seed phase, paying transaction fees and the necessity of buying blockchain-native tokens to transact on a network.
Coinbase is the world’s second-largest centralized crypto exchange by volume, with a daily trading volume of $1.86 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Related: Up to 99% of Mt. Gox’s $8.2B Bitcoin could be sold — Analyst
Coinbase Smart Wallet could become a neobank competitor
To bolster mass adoption, Coinbase recently launched its smart wallet, with more beginner-friendly features.
The new wallet replaces complex seed phrases with easier sign-in options such as account names and passcodes, which could become the standard for payments, according to Turakhia:
“Things that many of us who have been in the industry have become used to paying for gas, having a native token… That’s not a normal sort of set of logic when you’re trying to pay for a cup of coffee.”
To further ease the onboarding process, the gas fees on the new wallet will be sponsored by Coinbase exchange.
The wallet is available on the Ethereum mainnet and all the blockchains that are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Related: Ether ETFs will only be a ‘sidekick’ to Bitcoin ETFs — Bloomberg analyst
Consumer apps are the “path to mass adoption”
Consumer applications with daily usage potential, which are being improved by blockchain technology, will be the path to mass adoption, according to Turakhia. He explained:
“The path to mass adoption is consumer apps… Something fun, something that doesn’t feel technical or crypto-like, but actually fun.”
One such app bolstering mass crypto adoption is the Telegram-based mini-game Hamster Kombat, which surpassed 239 million users in just 81 days.
The Telegram mini app has 4 million–5 million new users joining daily, making it one of the fastest-growing digital services in the world, according to Telegram founder Pavel Durov.