None of todays crypto wallets will ever reach PMF.

First, by PMF I mean ~100 million users in 5 years. By crypto wallets, I mean literally every wallet that is live now, including both incumbents like Metamask and fresh contenders like Rainbow, Family, or Uniswap Wallet.

At the same time, the major pain points stayed more or less the same over the years:

* the need for a seed phrase
* concept of gas
* multichain ecosystem
* tx auth flow (connect -> sign -> submit -> wait)

With that in mind, I can envision an optimal wallet UX for regular users.

* main asset is USD, top up with fiat or stables from any bank/CEX/wallet
* gas is abstracted away; doesn't have to be fully subsidised, but at least remove the need for microtransactions (those contribute massively to cognitive load)

* no need to bridge, assets are bridged automatically as needed
* no need to back and forth between dapp and wallet, the dapp has control over non-financial txs (a la delegate.cash)

All while being non-custodial and being a good citizen in the Ethereum ecosystem (no KYC, wallet connect, can migrate away any time)

All of that can and will be achieved with todays tech. That would be enough to move the needle in terms of complexity.

The problem is, it would be such a radical change that crypto natives just won't adopt (e.g. not having control over which chain your assets are right now). It just doesn't make sense within the existing wallet apps, for the majority of the existing users.

As an example, a USD-centric wallet will never be adopted by crypto natives. At the same time, a USD-centric wallet is the only wallet that makes sense for people.

Downloading a wallet app from the app store, creating a wallet, and buying some ETH is not hard. My mom has a wallet app with some crypto/DeFi in it. The thing is, she doesn't use it.

With the current UX, she will never become a Uniswap/Zora/Lens DAU. The financial/social/cultural gain must be so gigantic for her to make a single transaction, let alone do it regularly. All because the risk and complexity are hard.

Even I try to minimise the transactions I make, because it is just so tiresome to double-check everything, especially if it's on a multisig or hard wallet. I'd love to do more stuff onchain, but I don't want to always go through the "connect wallet -> switch network -> confirm tx" drill, I have better things to do.

At the same time, I'm using FC quite regularly, and even more or less accustomed to the idea of paying Dan Tax for onchain actions, as long as I get a big benefit from it.

Not having to connect a wallet + think about gas/ETH is a HUGE win. I'm sure most people realise that, but I'm not sure they realise the implications of that in wallet design.

TL;DR: in wallet space, we need revolution not evolution

Why?

Let's start with key tech developments. In the last year or so, there's been excessive progress towards:

* account abstraction
* passkeys
* cheap blockspace (L2s)

Great thread. It's an insightful point that today's wallets have evolved in a training loop with cryptonatives as we grew up together, and there's no reason to think that a wallet that successfully attracts 100M newcomers should or *could* rely on today's cryptonative UX.

Strongly agree. I also think the next best wallet UX is a telegram bot style app that uses a SAFE multisig

Having worked closely with AA, I can confirm that 4337 compatible Contract Accounts with support for passkeys, social recovery and a dead man switch will easily beat any Externally Owned Account. 

Also, the future is far closer than we think it is. Just a few little things left.

Coinbase blending dot com into Wallet would be 100M+ today

I find Argent to be dead simple, it's easier than my bank app tbh. I think something like it will be the main wallet that people use.

My retort is always: we can't abstract over credit cards today. Chains are much more heterogeneous than those - and it's worse for bridges. I doubt we can abstract over those - it just wouldn't be safe or wise.

Or you need something like crypto FDIC insurance.