Gemini and Coinbase Are the Hubs of Crypto — and They Need to Start Acting Like it.
Let me start this with a controversial claim — the exchanges (that is, Gemini and Coinbase) are increasingly becoming the centralized hubs of crypto.
And that’s ok.
If you think you can do a better job at key management than an exchange (or if you are a security fetishist who does this kind of stuff for fun), you still of course have the option to spend time and money setting up your own secure private key management. However, for the vast majority of people, it is probably more secure and definitely more convenient to simply leave your assets in an exchange. Joe Blow Crypto Trader doesn’t want to deal with private keys, and they shouldn’t have to. Joe Blow Ethereum User doesn’t want to deal with it either. They also don’t want to have to deal with Metamask in order to use an Ethereum application — but unfortunately, they have no other choice at the moment.
Metamask is Difficult and Confusing
My first experience with Metamask was using it on a decentralized exchange to trade Ether for various ERC-20s. I did not like that experience. Metamask was confusing and hard for me to use even though I have a lot of experience with web apps (I’ve even built a few). Non-expert (most) technology users who try to use applications that require Metamask will suffer a high attrition rate. That’s bad. We need to have Ethereum applications that are easy to use, otherwise the crypto space will suffer greatly.
My team and I are developing an Ethereum application called Arbol (www.arbolcoin.com, www.arbol.app). Arbol is a P2P marketplace for hedging weather risk. Think of it as the eBay of crop insurance. It’s an app that’s aimed at people with an average level of technical expertise.
Right now, Arbol users need to install and fund Metamask, as well as have an understanding of how wallets and gas work in order to get started. This will be prohibitively difficult for your average crop futures person. I would imagine it would be difficult for a subsistence farmer in India as well. This is frustrating for me, because I have very few options to solve this problem as a UX designer. We could “go full Coinbase” and compete with the exchanges and start storing users’ private keys, but I want to stay focused on weather risk, not key management infrastructure. So we’re basically stuck with this really hard-to-use application that makes it difficult to grow our user base.
More API Services Will Make Ethereum Usable
There is actually a way out of this terrible situation. The answer is for Gemini and Coinbase to allow 3rd party Ethereum apps such as Arbol to interface with their exchange-managed accounts via API integration. This way, Metamask could be completely cut out of the equation, and Ethereum apps could behave more or less like conventional, easy-to-use web apps. People won’t have to worry about storing their private keys securely, and they can skip the UX compromises currently associated with Ethereum apps.
Gemini and Coinbase do currently have API services that allow external applications to, after authenticating with the account owner via OAuth2, send Ether. So the “sending Ether” part of Metamask is actually already redundant. However, Gemini and Coinbase DO NOT allow external applications to call specific Ethereum smart contract functions (the main feature of Metamask).
Gemini and Coinbase, please expand your API services to include this desperately needed feature. Assume your mantle as the hub of crypto, and solve the usability issues associated with Metamask so that developers can build decent Ethereum apps.
