Why Crypto's Future Looks More like Revolut than MetaMask

Editorial Calendar Why Crypto’s Future Looks More like Revolut than MetaMask The contributed piece below argues that the remaining obstacle is a design choice: crypto applications still expose networks, bridges and gas fees to their customers in a way that consumer fintech stopped doing more than a decade ago. It draws on the author’s time atRevolutand on a product his current company launched in August. Declan Hannonis chief executive ofAurora Labs, the company behind Aurora Intents, a cross-chain execution layer built on NEAR Intents, and was previously global director of partnerships at Revolut.

The article that follows sets out his opinion, and includes a description of an Aurora Labs product launch. When I led global partnerships at Revolut, the surest sign that a launch had landed well was silence. Businesses sent money to Spain, paid for dinner in Warsaw, held eight currencies at once and expensed them all correctly.

Almost nobody asked what happened underneath. Nobody wrote in hoping to understand correspondent banking or how an FX spread gets priced. They wanted the balance to update, payroll and expenses to just work and the employee cards to be used safely and without issue.

Everything else was ours to worry about. Crypto has spent a decade asking for the opposite. Networks.

Gas. Bridges. Wrapped assets.

Confirmation windows. A vocabulary test before a newcomer has done anything, and every word on it carries a penalty for getting it wrong. The best phrase I used to hear was that crypto meant you could ‘be your own bank’, a frightening concept to anybody coming from that industry.

The result is that if a user sends funds on the wrong network then they are lost and nobody can reverse it. In card payments, the same mistake opens a chargeback and usually ends with an apology