Cryptocurrency is experiencing its first true bear market. Bitcoin and Ethereum are hovering well below their all-time highs, while lesser tokens and NFTs have lost far more.

At the same time, there is clearly more interest in crypto assets in general than ever before, as industry leaders from Block’s Jack Dorsey to Tesla’s Elon Musk will attest. With this in mind, I believe that now is a critical time to take a breath and consider what the industry can do to improve its customers’ experiences.

Authentication

Let’s start at the beginning: authenticating your crypto account. A lot of people have been scared off by stories of hacking and losing crypto due to phishing scams, like last month’s heist of actor Seth Green’s Bored Ape NFTs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While decentralization and encryption make digital assets more secure than their physical counterparts, we can do better on authentication, beginning with the adoption of multi-signature — or multisig — authentication. Much like a physical safety deposit box, multisig crypto wallets require at least two keys to open. This increases security exponentially, but multisig can do far more than prevent phishing scams. It can also create redundancy, so the loss of a wallet’s keys does not mean the loss of its contents and facilitate the division of digital assets.

Combined with decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) platform technology, this second benefit is especially exciting. With multiple keys, one could theoretically transform a crypto wallet into, for example, an automated joint checking or escrow account. In the first case, either key would open the wallet; in the second, transferring assets would require two out of three keys.


Safety and Security

One thing that we’ve all learned recently is that safety isn’t just about getting hacked. As the stock market suffered a historic rout over the past several months, the price of at least two popular stablecoins dipped below one dollar. Stablecoins, by definition, are designed to maintain dollar parity, either by an algorithmic burning process that increases scarcity when the price falls or by a pool of assets.

The most dramatic collapse so far was the Luna coin, an offshoot of Terra. Luna suffered the equivalent of a bank run, with nervous token owners rushing to liquidate at the same time, presumably to cover losses in other investments and/or margin calls.
Last month, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin suggested that the crypto community might emulate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guarantees bank deposits up to $250,000 per account. He pointed out that so-called “whales” could step in to bail out 99.6% of the Luna community, which is composed of very small token holders.

This was a reminder that every token is only as good as the community behind it. As Terra attempts to reboot its blockchain over the coming months, we’ll have to wait to see what happens, but there are encouraging signs that regulators are weeding out some of the crypto community’s bad apples. Just this month, for example, U.S. prosecutors filed the first insider trading case involving digital assets.


Ease of Use

User experience, or UX, isn’t just about security, however. If they have not done so already, crypto projects must optimize their platforms and/or websites for mobile searches and users alongside those made on non-mobile devices like personal computers. This will likely mean bringing in an experienced UX web design specialist to implement properly. This costs money and slows down development, but better UX is critical to wider acceptance.

Even better is the development of a discrete mobile application that streamlines the transfer of rewards to users’ digital wallets when making purchases, similar to how a browser extension can help users receive more timely notifications of rewards opportunities. The wallets themselves should also be easy to use, of course, connecting seamlessly with not only rewards platforms, but also fintech applications and e-commerce sites.

With the explosive growth of crypto over the past several years, hiccups were inevitable. Those of us in the industry should not stop innovating, but going forward, we should think about our customer experience far more frequently, and how to continuously improve it.


Hironobu Ueno is the CEO of double jump.tokyo, an innovative Japanese startup that is leading the charge in developing games using blockchain and NFT technology.