Everywhere, all at once. In a move similar to the strategy PayPal used nearly 20 years ago, Uniswap, a decentralized spot exchange, will enable a version of its exchange portal to be embedded in any website using its ‘swap widget.’
The swap widget allows any website to embed access to Uniswap’s exchange and enables users to exchange tokens without leaving the host site.
Uniswap is leading the charge to further decentralize its service, as it is the clear market leader for decentralized exchanges.
Over the past seven days, as of 4/20/22, Uniswap has transacted $14 billion in total volume across its liquidity pools.
Make it simple. The next major milestone for crypto is adopting and onboarding 1 billion users. Reaching 1B provides the scale needed to build massive decentralized systems that can truly compete with today's centralized offerings. The question becomes, “how do we get to 1B users?”
Talk to anyone outside of the crypto space, and they’ll tell you:
They don’t understand.
People don’t understand how to use the platforms. They don’t understand how to secure their tokens and assets. Beyond that, many may not even understand the core concepts that underlie money itself.
Where does money come from?
Why enables something to hold value?
What makes one medium of exchange better than another?
What does the hardness of a currency refer to?
The list goes on. But most people won’t ever take the time to understand these concepts. Perhaps they should, but that’s for another day. Most people will interact with systems they can easily understand, using rules and guidelines that are easy to explain and understand.
Look at the state of personal finance education in the modern world. Understanding of how to manage your financial life varies widely. We’ve done what we can to teach people, and better resources for learning personal finance have become more available over time. But the average understanding remains low.
Crypto asks people to learn or relearn concepts they may have never mastered in the fiat system. Some education will happen, and open and accessible resources to learn will pull some people into the world of finance for the first time. I have friends that fall into this category. They had no interest or understanding of money, investing, or finance before crypto. Crypto was the catalyst that made these abstract concepts tangible and interesting.
But the rest? They probably won’t come around until the products are:
A) Dead simple to use.
B) Embedded into higher abstraction, easier to use systems (i.e., the modern internet vs. the early internet)
C) Both A and B.
How does Uniswap help accelerate adoption? The Swap Widget makes navigating these crypto services slightly easier and more intuitive. Switching between is too complex for the average user. If a user can come to Opensea looking to buy an NFT, and swap their currency to purchase without leaving Opensea—the entire system has become less complex and easier to understand for the average user.
The more these services integrate to create a simple, intuitive UX—the more adoption we will see from people who don’t want to take the time to understand complex systems.