Click. Sign. Approve. Rage Quit. 📵
Lack of patience, not gas fee, is crypto adoption’s largest bottleneck
Hello
Every Saturday, I dive into a podcast from our partners at Decentralised.co and share what stayed with me.
Lately every episode feels like déjà vu: another guest, another take on breaking down DeFi’s walls. Cronje first, Mats then and now Jai Prasad. They all make a pitch for making DeFi more retail-friendly.
This week I reflect on the conversation between Saurabh Deshapande and Jai Prasad, co-founder of DefinitiveFi and previously with Coinbase, hosted by our partners at Decentralised.co.
In this episode, Jai lays out how DeFi could feel like Coinbase Prime with best execution, MEV protection, smoother UX and without handing over custody. If you’ve ever rage-quit mid-swap, the full episode is worth your time.
I don’t remember my first crypto profit. I do remember my first crypto irritation.
It was when I was buying a base.eth name. I had triple-checked the wallet balance, refreshed the explorer twice, even calculated how much I needed for gas. By the time I clicked Buy, instead of my base.eth name MetaMask threw me into an abyss: sign here, confirm there, wait for approval, now sign again.
I still haven’t gotten over that moment. It taught me that the biggest bottleneck for crypto adoption is patience, not block space or liquidity. How long can a normal human put up with pop-ups on decentralised exchanges before they retreat back to Coinbase?
And then there are the purists who jump at the first instance to mock traditional finance investors for choosing centralised, indirect ownership of crypto assets.
Three of the last five podcasts I’ve listened to have all circled this same truth.
Andre Cronje’s episode felt like a confession: decentralisation without usability is self-sabotage. Mats Olsen made it clearer with his analogy: block explorers give you receipts, not passbooks. The raw data is there, but you’re expected to stitch it into meaningful information. Let alone expect retail investors to make sense of the data without proper cross-referencing of sources.
And now, Jai is hammering the same nail from a different perspective: DeFi won’t scale until it stops acting like an obstacle course.
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Jai calls it democratising prime-brokerage infrastructure, the kind of best-execution tools that whales get through Coinbase Prime or FalconX. Things like smart order routing, gas optimisation, MEV protection.
I often wonder when I read news about whales pulling off alpha trades: what’s stopping others from emulating their success? Just skill? Even in this era of AI agent-driven transactions, is that it?
I think the reality is that the walls are just too many and too tall to incentivise anybody from the other side to scale them.
Take signing, for instance. Even if some retail traders have gathered the motivation and knowledge to enter the jungle that early crypto felt like, there’s a pop-up at every stage requiring them to connect a wallet, sign it, approve it, ensure enough gas fees and bridge some if there isn’t. It just never stops.
And that’s what even Jai wants to be removed.
“Signing every time you do something — that concept should be removed.”
He’s right. It’s not only annoying but also demoralising. It makes crypto feel like a maze. Security is a non-negotiable, agreed. But that doesn’t mean we have to trade off a good UX in the name of security.
There can be a middle ground.
Like we have a password as part of most login credentials. Yet, for those who are a bit too particular about security, there is a two-factor authentication or authenticator code.
Builders hiding behind “security and purity” excuses will keep seeing mediocre adoption.
Why do I feel this way? I speak from my DeFi journey, which has been a catalogue of such walls: Buying that base.eth name and clicking until my fingers numbed; Yield-farming on a sidechain where I couldn’t figure out why my balance wasn’t showing until I realised I hadn’t added the chain to my wallet and trying to ape into a mint where the first three attempts failed because I didn’t have the right gas token.
In all these cases, it wasn’t about the money I lost (and boy did I lose plenty), it was the energy I was drained of each time I had to try something. Crypto constantly reminded me that I wasn’t “pro” enough.
And that’s the thing Jai is onto in the episode.
Prime-grade infra is about taking the same rails that institutions already rely on, including routing across liquidity pools, optimising gas, and abstracting them into something retail can use without friction.
Listen to full episode here 👇🏾
Although most of us don’t want to feel like traders, we do want the swap to go through at the best possible rates.
I dived into DeFi because of its possibilities and potential. It allows anybody, who has a desire to learn and take risks, to make it count. But what I am beginning to see today after listening to the recent podcasts is that you’re constantly second-guessing with DeFi. Should I route this through Arbitrum? Should I pay higher gas now or wait? Should I bridge USDC or native ETH? And each wrong guess makes you feel a little more foolish, even when the stakes are small. At worst, it drives away adoption.
The good part is that infrastructure to remove all of this is being built.
When Jai says Definitive wants to “give everyone the same playing field,” I see optimism and intent. He gave examples of Turnkey, Privy and others who are busy solving these problems in the ecosystem.
I’d like to see if DeFi can actually give me Coinbase-level UX without Coinbase-level custody. Can it stop asking me to prove my existence every ten seconds yet give me an option to secure my account with customisable security? Can it deliver prime infra without making me feel like I need a manual to navigate?
There’s a part of me that resists this.
I’ve always believed that crypto’s clunkiness carried a hidden benefit. It made us paranoid and, in turn, forced us to triple-check addresses, look up hashes and confirm balances manually. That friction kept us on our toes.
It’s a real fear. But after listening to Jai about what the ecosystem has been building, I feel maybe the fear is also misplaced. Paranoia should be baked into the infra, not outsourced to the end-user. We don’t ask people to double-check TCP/IP packets when they send an email. Why should crypto adoption hinge on whether my cousin remembers to toggle between Arbitrum and Base?
We need a DeFi that’s safer by design, not by habit.
There’s a trilogy in the three episodes I referred to earlier. Cronje pointed at ideology, Mats at data and Jai at execution. But I see all three pointing at really one thing: the need to abstract away complexity so that crypto can be used without roadblocks.
Not dumbing it down. Just making it invisible, the way card networks are invisible when you tap your phone at a café.
Maybe then I’ll stop measuring my DeFi journey by how many times I had to click “Sign” in one sitting.
That’s it for this week’s reflections.
Off to eat samosas and complete a swap without reconfirming it a dozen times,
Prathik
The episode does go deeper on this where Jai and Saurabh discuss how Definitive hides the plumbing while still letting you configure your own level of paranoia. Worth a listen if you’ve ever cursed at MetaMask mid-swap.
Listen to full episode here 👇🏾
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