We all know that the on-chain crypto ecosystem is still very difficult for newer people to use with a lot of new jargon for them to learn along with novel concepts such as “gas fees” and “bridging”. Though, in time, these things will be abstracted away just like concepts such as IP addresses were abstracted away by domain names and the univesal serial bus (‘USB’ for you youngens) made all the computing hardware plug-and-play.

Rainbow @rainbowdotme

Rainbow supports cheaper networks like Polygon, Optimism, and Arbitrum out of the box without any need for manual configuration… they just work and all of your tokens appear without needing to switch networks learn.rainbow.me/manage-your-wa…

January 28th 2022

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Rainbow is making a good first step here by automatically supporting popular Ethereum scaling solutions without users having to add these networks to their wallet (like how it is with Metamask). This is a simple but powerful feature that abstracts away terminology such as ‘RPC’, ‘Chain ID’ and ‘Block Explorer’ - things that can be intimidating for new users and honestly things that all users shouldn’t ever have to deal with. Also, Rainbow having a little logo showing which network your assets are on is also a simple but very effective quality of life feature - there’s nothing worse than thinking you have ETH on mainnet when in reality its on a layer 2 network and you have to go sleuthing on a block explorer to figure out which one.

In web2 land, everything is about optimizing for the least amount of clicks possible in order to both give the user a good experience and minimize the risk of them clicking off the website. For example, as soon as you land on YouTube’s home page after opening the app, you are literally 1 click away from watching a recommended video - this is a total of 2 clicks before you are served an ad and then the video you wanted to watch is played. The same is true for basically all of social media and also non-social media apps such as Uber which make it incredibly easy to book a ride (ever notice that it’s just a few clicks to do so?) - this is very intentional.

Though despite all of this progress in web2 land, do you know what’s still a massive pain and definitely not 2-3 clicks away? Doing anything finance related! Not only does it take an undefined number of clicks, but it also takes a lot of time - usually days or weeks - to do basically anything using the traditional finance system. This is where DeFi already has the TradFi system beat - it’s only a few clicks to do something such as start earning yield on your dollars - but only if you know what you’re doing. We need to get to the point where any user can do this no matter how much experience they have and that’s when we will truly see mass adoption of DeFi.

In saying all of this, finance generally is quite boring and not something most people actually want to think about. I’d argue that most of the fun things we see in the “DeFi ecosystem” aren’t really finance - they’re simply “money games” or just straight up ponzis. Due to this, I don’t think we need to make DeFi entertaining, we just need to make it really easy for people to do the simple things like earn yield on their dollars, draw a line of credit, and swap assets on the fly. Once we do this, DeFi will very quickly take over and cement itself as the financial infrastructure of the world.

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.