Black-and-white narratives are often popular in crypto. One of the more popular ones is how crypto’s chief purpose is to “eliminate intermediaries”. A more accurate one would be to “eliminate bad and inefficient intermediaries in very specific fields”. But hey, that does not a good meme make.
To state the bleeding obvious, the “every man for himself” memes are detached from reality and stuck in 20,000 BC.
Skilled service providers are the lifeblood of every advanced economy. They can do a particular task far better and far more efficiently than you ever can - and you can get a 100 different things done without learning each skill by yourself, which is pretty much impossible anyway.
Coming back to crypto, self-custody, verification, reading smart contracts, using them etc. are no easy feat. Yes, UX will get better over time, but some of the core tenets required for self-sovereign access - the ability to run your own node, manage your keys, verify mart contracts etc. will simply never be accessible to 99.99% of the world’s population. According to Etherscan and related services, I’ve made 10,000 transactions, and by all accounts am a power user. Yet, even I don’t trust myself to self-custody anything more than I can afford to lose, and I have to rely on multiple third parties to gauge the reliability of a crypto protocol. Running a node is also a big hassle, so I just use a third-party RPC - though I hope with the advent of tech like stateless clients and validity proofs this is something I could do myself in the future.
Today, crypto is a maturing industry with hundreds of millions of users worldwide. The key product-market fits are: holding BTC or ETH as alternative stores-of-value, speculation, and stablecoin exchange. A vast majority - well over 90% - of these users use CEXs, custodians, brokers etc. As crypto continues expanding mainstream adoption, even more users will be onboarded on to centralized intermediaries.
And this is perfectly fine. Sure, the wonderful thing about crypto is that people do have the option to go self-sovereign, but most people simply won’t bother and just use a service - like they do for a hundred other things in their lives. Instead of shaming them, we should welcome them. The key challenge, then, is for crypto as a community to build and shape trustworthy institutions with excellent UX and security. I know all of this is very obvious, but it needs to be reiterated - we need great centralized services providers in crypto.
My first post on Mirror was A Vision of Ethereum - 2025. Today, we’re halfway between that post and 2025. I still expect most normie users to continue using a centralized aggregator (as they already are), but I’m also optimistic about the “tech-savvy normie user” going with smart wallets settling over L2s. With Base, Coinbase has a great shot at onboarding both the normie user - who can access Base and its dapps through Coinbase.com with a web2-like UX (I don’t know if they are building this - but I hope they are!) - and the self-custodied user who’ll use a smart wallet.