Planet Money Buys A CryptoKitty; Takes Them Over An Hour

In yesterday's episode of The Indicator, Planet Money’s Stacey Vanek Smith and Cardiff Garcia buy their first CryptoKitty. 

You can listen to the episode here. 

Just the first step of creating a Coinbase account and buying ETH took the two of them over an hour.

"It got really frustrating...all of this took more than an hour. We were totally wiped out." 

And that’s before having to figure out how to transfer their ETH to a browser wallet so that they could use it. 

The episode was a good reminder of the UX challenges we have yet to solve for crypto/dapps. 

There are two ways we could go about crypto UX: One is to make it easier to buy, hold and transfer tokens. The other is to hide tokens from non-technical users entirely, the same way that Gmail abstracts away SMTP from its users. 

I’m more excited about the latter path and it’s the path we’re pursuing with the Middleman API, that Bitski is pursuing with their SDK and that Loom is pursuing with Loom Vault. 

Crypto wallets are intimidating; I asked a few hundred people how long they think it would take them to setup a crypto wallet, and most think it will take them more than 2+ hours to get one setup. 

Needless to say, I am excited to see dapps abstract away crypto to onramp new users.