Key takeaways from his latest blog – Cryptopolitan
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, recently shared some of his personal experiences with cryptocurrency in his latest blog post.
His insights provide valuable lessons for developers and users alike on how to improve user experience and reliability of decentralized finance (DeFi) systems.
The importance of personal payment systems
Vitalik said he learned the hard way that the internet isn’t 100% reliable and that customer internet is less reliable than dealer internet.
He suggests that personal payment systems should have some features that allow customers to transmit their transaction data directly to the merchant when that is the best way to transmit it.
Simple and robust UIs are better than fancy and fancy ones
Vitalik says he experienced a UI bug in his mobile wallet that made it impossible to scroll down and edit the gas limit field.
This shows that simple and robust UIs are better than fancy and elegant ones. But even most users don’t even know what gas limits are, so we really just need better defaults.
Improving the UX around taking transactions
Vitalik points out that UX around including transactions needs improvement, although there are fairly simple fixes. He credits the Brave Wallet team for taking his suggestions on the matter seriously, first increasing the maximum fee tolerance from 12.5% to 33% and more recently exploring ways to make stuck transactions more explicit in the UI make.
Social uplift is fragile and a bad idea
Vitalik had had bad experiences using Shamir’s Secret Sharing to split the account’s private key into five parts. Two of his friends lost their key shards and a third one didn’t have the Firebase connection mechanism working for a long time.
Eventually, they figured out how to fix the problem, but Buterin ended up losing a small amount of BTC and ETH. Buterin suggests that the way to add guardians should be by providing their ETH address and recovery should be done via smart contract using ERC-4337 account abstraction wallets.
Wallet developers should start thinking much more explicitly about privacy
Vitalik suggests that wallet developers should start thinking much more explicitly about privacy. He also suggests that we need better forms of account abstraction to eliminate the need for centralized or even federated relays and to commodify the relaying role.
A good user experience isn’t about the average case, it’s about the worst case
Vitalik concludes that a good user experience is not about the average case; it’s about the worst case. A UI that is clean and elegant, but does weird and inexplicable things 0.723% of the time, causing big problems, is worse than a UI that reveals coarser details to the user, but at least makes it easier to understand what’s ahead goes and fix any problems that arise.
Buterin’s insights provide valuable lessons for developers and users on how to improve the user experience and reliability of DeFi systems.
Aside from the all-important issue of high transaction fees due to scaling not yet fully resolved, user experience is a key reason why many Ethereum users often opt for centralized solutions over decentralized on-chain alternatives.
With continuous improvements in UX and scalability, we can unlock the full potential of DeFi and make it accessible to everyone, regardless of their location or technical expertise.