Fragmentation

Quick post on product design and scaling.

The False Solution

Immediately, you may say that services such as Coinbase, OKX, Phantom, and Kraken overcome these roadblocks, and to that I say you are wrong. These services are designed in a dumbed down, suboptimal, and overly centralized manner. They care too much about being "easy" or "safe" ; they ignore the decentralized ethos of crypto, and any user with a brain will end up using a superior service rather than a limited, entry level service.

Current platforms that provide "Unified experiences" either over-abstract or are too centralized. Products end up feeling proverbially undercooked and often have excessively high fees or underwhelmingly low amounts of features. Examples: Trading coins directly in Phantom wallet has significantly higher fees and less tooling than using Jupiter. Coinbase Perps are lazy at best and are not designed for real traders and cannot scale with users who actually learn to trade, whilst also being overly centralized and stuck bending the knee to regulation and centralized power, going directly against the principles of decentralization.

A Path Forward

So how do we overcome this? Founders looking to create unified products for consumers need to come from the approach that all of the separate products in crypto are currently superior to any unified product in terms of user experience, and what they as founders/builders need to do is create a unified suite of products that not only cater to new users, but also experienced power users.

The Miata Principle

What I like to compare this type of product design logic to is a Mazda Miata. Mazda Miata's can be used by your elderly neighbor when she goes to the farmers market and she'll have the time of her life without a hitch, whilst simultaneously a professional driver can drive a Miata and push it to its limits like a performance vehicle and enjoy driving to its fullest. Users should be able to enter crypto from a singular platform and grow within it, to put it in short, the product should scale with the user.

An Example

Users should have gas abstracted away if they want, but simultaneously the optionality should be there to tweak it for sniping capabilities. This exemplifies the core principle: rather than forcing users into a single paradigm, we provide optionality that increases utility across the entire user spectrum. Casual users benefit from seamless, abstracted transactions while snipers retain access to real-time gas monitoring, priority fee optimization, and the granular control necessary for competent trading. The same underlying infrastructure serves both use cases without compromise, demonstrating how proper architectural design can eliminate the false choice between simplicity and sophistication.

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