The assets of 295+ million crypto holders are not secure — by design
Creating crypto security for ordinary people
Da Vinci called it the ultimate sophistication. Chopin called it the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties.
Graphic designer Paul Rand called it the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.
We're talking about simplicity - the holy grail of product design. But what is it exactly?
Simplicity is about more than being easy to use - it's a state of usage so intuitive the product itself becomes transparent in the using: the user is thinking about what they are doing, not what they are doing it with. Watch any person scrolling through any social media feed - e.g. TikTok - and from their rapt expressions it's clear: not one of them is thinking about their phone, because they they are utterly focused on what the phone design is enabling. That's transparent design.
What The Evolution of the Mobile Phone Teaches Crypto Punks* About Design
The evolution of cellular phones is an interesting example of how design evolves from simple to complex, to simple again. In the case of mobile phones, this complexity manifest in buttons. The first mobile cellular phone is laughably clunky to our modern eyes, but it represented freedom and mobility when it came out in the early 1970s. As penetration spread phones just as rapidly evolved, getting smaller and smaller.
But even as they became more mobile they became more useful with the added feature of texting, with the counterintuitive result of an ever smaller form factor accommodating an ever larger keypad. The keypad evolution went from its earliest 12-button iteration (mimicking the standard rotary phone) to the 17-button Motorola Flip phone, to the 30+ button Blackberry and the 45+ button Nokia 5510 with full Qwerty keyboard.
As button number and functionality increased the UX became worse and worse, making the device less usable for whole demographics and setting the stage for Apple's world domination through its simple design - a phone with one button, then no buttons at all, is one of the most obvious examples of simplicity > complexity the consumer world has seen.
*all of us
Crypto mass adoption won't happen by accident but by design.
With 2022 being the biggest year yet for crypto losses from fraud, hacks and freezing of fund withdrawal from custodial wallets (more than $2+ billion) crypto hardware wallets are facing a similar revolution in design we have seen with phones. The earliest hardware wallet category entrants were similar to USB drives, because that's what security drives looked like at the time. As the category grew, some of the USB-shaped wallet gained tiny screens and buttons. In a callback mobile phones, the standard hardware wallet design became if anything even less welcoming to non-technical types.
"Design isn’t crafting a beautiful textured button with breathtaking
animation. It’s figuring out if there’s a way to get rid of the button
altogether.” –Edward TufteNow in the wake of the FTX collapse, many people are talking about how consumers can be protected from future implosions. Most agree, the hardware wallet category to date has made inroads only with the most technically proficient - a problem that is only spotlit when the damage of an FTX is already done, an accompanying chorus of "Not your keys, not your crypto" shouted after the slamming of the barn door and the draining of exchange wallets is complete.
The Hito Wallet team is building a crypto hardware wallet that's different by design. The key: starting with the user's need for a simple experience that gives anyone the self-confidence to take self-custody of their keys.
Much of the friction of current wallets - especially the fear of making an irrevocable mistake - dissolves in a human-forward design. Hito is wireless, reducing attack surfaces. Users will find it easy to see what they're signing on a 2" full color screen, interacting with their NFT assets with a familiar swipe and tap. Even checking to make sure the receiver's address is correct - a fraught task for even experienced crypto holders - has been made simple with the Hito emojjdress feature. The emojidress condenses a Ethereum 42-character addresses into a simple emoji graph of just six characters.
Even before the collapse of FTX, 2022 was the biggest year for crypto hacks. Despite this there remains millions of crypto holders with their assets held in exchanges, hoping the next hack, and the next, will somehow miss them and by doing so virtually ensuring that 2023 will be an even bigger year for hacks. What will stop the trend is simple/simplicity itself: a hardware design revolution that gives the average holder of crypto and NFTs self-confidence in self-custody.
All eyes on the wallet
According to Changpeng Zhao of Binance, the lack of wallet simplicity is the primary barrier to crypto mass adoption. "Today most people cannot store their private keys securely. The wallets require them to be technical," he said in an interview. Tech Crunch Magazine agrees, writing "Many hardware wallets require a lot more technical skills than the average person can muster...simplification is to be welcomed."
Charlie Varley, Tech Lead, IOTA Foundation is more blunt, predicting "The usability of wallet apps will make or break public acceptance and understanding of cryptocurrencies." and adding that regardless of how much innovation occurs in the crypto space, consumers are going to need both guidance and a simple gateway to interact with - one that makes the unfamiliar familiar and fun while doing the heavy lifting of security conveniently and invisibly - before mass adoption of cryptocurrencies can be fully realized.
Sounds simple enough.
