Blocto: Pioneering The Next Generation of User-Friendly Wallets

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Coinmonks

8 min readApr 14, 2021

There is a new wave of innovative wallets that make crypto more user-friendly, accessible and inclusive. Projects like Blocto will power the mass adoption of blockchain technology in the years to come.

The Awful State of Crypto User Experience

Around midday my phone rang. It was Nick.

“Hey man, can you help me get started with Ethereum?”

Nick is a good friend of mine. He’s in his twenties, and he gives lectures on digital innovation management. He heard about Ethereum when he discovered his favourite artist was selling an NFT. Even though he’s not into coding, he does know his way around technology, that’s for sure.

Happy that Nick was interested in my area of expertise, I made some time and laid out the necessary steps for him to get started. When we hung up, he had already installed Metamask, and I was sure he’d get the hang of it in no time.

I was wrong.

My phone rang again late in the evening. Nick got stuck in one of the very first steps: signing a transaction.

Because he had provided a very low gas price, his first transaction got stuck. It took him until midnight to fix everything, and by that time Nick was not particularly eager to try this blockchain thing anymore.

Let’s face it: The user experience of blockchain technology is nothing short of terrible.

How will blockchain technology ever be accessible, when even people like Nick — people in my age, people that do have technical skills to at least some degree — struggle on the very first steps of interaction? And if this is the case, how will my less technical friends, let alone my parents, ever be able use blockchain technology?

Mass Adoption and the Central Role of Wallets

Mass adoption will be the make-or-break moment for blockchain technology in the next years.

Think about it: the first and second cycle of cryptocurrency adoption have shown that the technical specifications generally work and that there are use cases out there that indeed profit from this technology. Now, in the midst of the third crypto cycle, blockchain projects have to prove that they can be adopted by a larger audience with no technical background in order to sustain a healthy growth in the sector.

In this process, wallets will play a crucial role, simply because they are the central point of interaction with a blockchain. The wallet is the first thing a user has to get in order to participate in a blockchain network, and it is in the wallet where the user administers funds or sends transactions.

Thus, if we want to ensure mass adoption of crypto, we have to fix the user experience; and if we want to improve the user experience, we have to start by re-thinking and re-designing wallets.

Blocto: Making User Experience a Top Priority

This is exactly where Portto comes into play, the team behind the new Blocto wallet.

Blocto is an incredibly well-designed and user-friendly application that has the potential to inspire a new generation of wallets. This new generation will put their main focus on accessibility and user experience, reducing the entry barrier for new users.

This development goes hand in hand with the rise of other projects that make these aspects a top priority — it is no surprise that Blocto partnered up with Flow, the blockchain behind the famous collectibles-dapp NBA Top Shot.

Flow is currently growing at record speed, with many new applications in the making. What all those applications have in common is that they are trying to merge blockchain use cases with the already familiar experiences of users — just like Blocto.

Now, let’s have a look at the features that make Blocto a such an innovative candidate in the world of blockchain wallets.

Accessibility in Design, Language and Content

There are many neatly-designed wallets out there, but Blocto takes things to another level. The interface is reduced to a bare minimum, creating a well-structured visual environment that is straightforward to use while not compromising on aesthetics.

This simplicity can also be found in the language used in the application: You won’t find any technical terms like gas, gas price, transaction hash or Mnemonic, that would sound unfamiliar to any new user. Instead, the home screen of the application features a collection of tutorials and educational articles about Blocto and blockchain technology in general, all written in an easy-to-grasp fashion. This is a great invitation for new users, motivating them to dive deeper into the specific topics.

Blocto Points: Integrating Chains by Rethinking Gas Payment

When you send transaction on a blockchain like Ethereum, you will have to pay transaction fees. This mechanism prevents people from spamming the network with malicious transactions, an attack referred to as “Denial of Service” (DoS).

Transaction costs are crucial for the security of the network, especially for a Turing-Complete environment like Ethereum. But they also make things more complicated for newcomers to the space — remember Nick and his rocky start with Ethereum?

Besides those problems, there are also complications for more advanced users. For example, when a user interacts with many different blockchains (and truth is, the future will likely be multi-chain), he or she will always have to pay the transaction fees in the currency of the specific blockchain.

Blocto simplifies this process introducing Blocto points. If you send transactions on any blockchain supported by Blocto (for example Flow or Ethereum), you can always pay those fees in Blocto points. This frees users in a simple yet elegant way from having to hold various amounts of different tokens, just to be able to send transactions in those networks.

Also, any new Blocto wallet comes precharged with some Blocto points, so a user can trigger some basic actions before needing buying more crypto. The process of purchasing Blocto points is also quite straightforward and can be completed with payment providers like Google Pay, only needing a single click. In my view, this is one of the fastest and most convenient ways to get started.

The intermediary step of introducing Blocto points is a promising approach in simplifying the aspect of transaction costs without having to change the underlying workings of the blockchains themselves. It enables cross-chain interactions while keeping things simple and intuitive.

Security: A Flexible Model

When talking about wallets, we will have to talk about security. After all, some users will keep considerable amounts of money here, so this is not a negligible topic at all. The topic of security in a blockchain environment can be thought of as a scale spanning between two extremes.

On the one side we have absolute ease-of-use: A user simply signs in to the applications with a password and never has to deal with things like private keys, mnemonics and other technical stuff. The problem with this approach is that we heavily compromise on security. “Not your keys, not your crypto” is a famous saying, and many users have made the painful experience that this is indeed true. When somebody else is managing your private key on your behalf, you depend on them.

On the other hand, there is complete security: You run your own node on the blockchain, you save your private key on a device isolated from the web, you change keys and accounts often. While providing a great level of security, this is also a very complicated and time-consuming approach; furthermore, most beginners will not have the technical background to implement this.

The creators of Blocto have found a great way of combining these to aspects in a flexible model that essentially lets the users decide how they want to go about their security. First, there is the custodial mode, where Blocto is in charge of managing your private keys. This is the default setting, enabling a painless onboarding process with reduced technical overhead. Once their blockchain skills get more profound, users can always activate the non-custodial mode, where they can take charge of their keys themselves.

There is no one-size-fits-all when approaching blockchain security, but it is definitely a good idea to put the decision in the hands of the users. In this regard, Blocto proposes an interesting two-stage model, that can adapt to the needs of different user priorities.

Conclusion

The main goal of this case study was to illustrate the steep entry barrier into the crypto world and how a new generation of wallets might be able to simplify this process significantly.

Blocto is a pioneer in this group, and this article tried to point out the features that make this project so promising. In my view, Blocto will help to fuel the mass adoption of blockchain technology in the years to come, providing a user-friendly entrypoint for newcomers and a convenient cross-chain solution for seasoned users alike.

Further Links

If you want to find out more about Blocto or get engaged in the community, check out the following resources:

Blocto Website
Bloctoswap (first DEX on Flow)
Blocto Token & Blocto Token Whitepaper (Governance token of Blocto)
Blocto Discord
Github (Portto)
Blocto Twitter

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