Development Thoughts #1: User-driven development

It’s been 11 months since we started working on the first prototype version of Oobit, our vision of how cryptocurrency access can be transformed. Before that, we were a small web-application serving a small audience in Israel, helping to match P2P opportunities between individuals looking to sell and buy crypto.

Now, we’re a fully user-driven solution. Our entire core team from the top to bottom — including our investors — are working to create what we believe will be the answer to accessibility and usability in cryptocurrency.

We wanted to take a look back and share with everyone about our journey. Here’s our experience hunting down the problems that Oobit aims to resolve today.

The mission: make crypto easy

We picked out the key issues facing users in the crypto space. Processes that were difficult to understand. Lack of education. Systems that were unfamiliar and non-compliant with today’s standards. Lack of visibility for different liquidity sources (we call it “Cold Liquidity”).

We went through an iteration process that took the crypto experience apart, down to its core — essentially, it boiled down to how many seconds we could shave off each step in the user journey. What kind of technology would minimize user confusion? What information would users want to see? What methodologies could we adapt from other services? We sat down with over 30 participants in a study involving how they began in crypto, what they were doing now, and what sort of experiences they had. Each of them described a familiar experience, even if they were tech-savvy.

Group 1: The new users

The biggest find in our problem-hunting was accessibility. It wasn’t just the learning curve in the tools used in crypto, it was the difficulty in finding up-to-date or concise information. There was no user manual; every participant in every country had to spend a day searching google and their local community groups before they dared to try their luck owning a bitcoin. It was a trial-and-error process.

The first hurdle was of course how to buy crypto. We found that this wasn’t necessarily a pricing issue, but the fact that most guides tended to default to purchase methods that were accessible globally, such as credit card payments. Further research led us to realize that credit card payment processors were charging a huge premium to justify the “risk” involved in crypto transactions. There were actually local purchase methods that were charging much lower fees and even had better, localized rates for crypto, but due to the information clutter (one user described it as a “swamp”), there was no way for users to know that the rates could be better.

For those who stuck through the first day of research and entered community groups to ask questions, they found themselves more educated, but with a second problem to deal with — Know-Your-Customer verification. Platforms offering legitimate deals and low fees often came bundled with difficult regulatory problems. They were classified as businesses dealing in cross-border finance and had to ensure each one of their clients was registered in full. This led to a pressing problem: digital KYC processes had not yet caught up to the standards required, and this meant that much of the registrations were manual and slow. By the time a user would be authorized and able to purchase their first Bitcoin, prices had changed drastically and opportunities lost.

Then came wallet types, transaction difficulties, phishing sites, lost private keys, and more. By the time we finished running through the user journey at this stage, we felt exhausted. Could Oobit really address all these problems?

Group 2: The crypto guys

We then moved on to catalog the problems faced by more experienced users. Although at this point, users were more familiarized and able to find their way around the complicated cryptocurrency environment, similar problems existed.

The first group were traders — they were in it for the day-to-day profit, and each one of them had their preferred methods for finding opportunities in crypto. This wasn’t necessarily a good thing:

1. Traders tended to stick with one or two platforms they managed to “get working”, rather than actually because those platforms offered better service. This was due to a complicated set of problems — some of them had bad experiences moving to less well-known exchanges, difficulty in signing up or withdrawing their crypto, lack of trust, inability to get their KYC approved, UI/interface preferences, or simply disinterest in navigating the ultra-complicated crypto sphere.
2. Traders didn’t know which platforms had the best price and simply followed the price movements on their favorite platforms. We found that some were paying as high as a 15% spread or premium despite available alternatives — and they sometimes knowingly did so to avoid the troublesome process of moving to another platform.

The second group was crypto hodlers. These were people who bought cryptocurrencies as a long-term investment and did not intend to return to them for a period of time. Hodlers painted an entirely different picture: while they weren’t as affected by day-to-day inconveniences as traders, their problems were in some ways bigger:

Private keys could be lost or forgotten. Paper wallets could go missing. Hardware wallets became outdated and needed upgrading. They didn’t know that there was no password recovery. They were buying coins for their grandkids and were not tech-savvy. They stored coins years ago on exchanges. They didn’t know of coins they obtained from hard forks. They mined the bitcoins and were unable to retrieve it on an old device.

The worst part of it all, was perhaps the attitude the general crypto community took to their problems: many faced ridicule when they tried to find solutions. In one case, a user locked out of access to his bitcoin on an exchange was called “stupid for trusting a centralized exchange with their coins”.

The team likes to call this group by a unique term: “The Silenced”, to remind ourselves that we could not take our knowledge of crypto for granted. We knew that the problem was there, and was hiding in plain sight. We could not afford to have any more users put off by the difficulties in crypto — who could know how many users we lost for every person who is now active in crypto today?

Using problems to shape our product

Using the information we gathered across all these users, we now had our hypothesis: adoption in crypto could be much higher but is at a bottleneck due to inaccessibility.

In Development Thoughts #2, we will share more about how the user experience led to our decisions in building the technology stack for Oobit, and why we think it’ll be the necessary catalyst for user growth across the entire industry.