Poor UX is causing stablecoin ‘ticker fatigue’: ZachXBT

The number of different stablecoin tickers and token standards is fragmenting liquidity across the crypto ecosystem and burdening users with a poor experience that is costly, technical,and time-consuming, according to onchain sleuth ZachXBT.

Cross-chain bridging restrictions, gas and transaction fees that must be paid in the native token of the blockchain being used, and a lack of universal token support across exchanges are all obstacles users face in transferring stablecoins across the crypto ecosystem, ZachXBT said. He gave the following example:

“Imagine you receive USDPT to your Solana address but realize your wallet doesn’t have USDPT on the default token list. You also need gas, so you bridge ETH from Ethereum and wait several minutes, and want to swap USDPT for USD on a centralized exchange.”

Source: ZachXBT

From there, the user may realize that their exchange of choice doesn’t support the token or a swap on that token and is forced to bridge to a different blockchain, spend more on gas fees, download another wallet or sign up for another exchange to execute the transaction.

The lack of a smooth user experience and intuitive user interfaces (UI) in crypto remains one of the biggest hurdles to achieving mass adoption and parity with Web2 and traditional financial applications, industry executives told Cointelegraph.

Related: Visa to start supporting stablecoins on four blockchains

Abstracting away the technicality: the future of stablecoins

Crypto exchanges will eventually abstract away stablecoin tickers and present a front-end interface to users that only displays the fiat currency underlying the stablecoin, such as the US dollar or British pound, according to Mert Mumtaz, CEO of remote procedure call (RPC) node provider Helius.

The exchanges will do the heavy lifting of crosschain swaps and transfers behind the scenes, allowing users to seamlessly interact with stablecoins from any issuer without the technical barriers, Mumtaz said.

AI agents and autonomous AI bots will also reduce the technical difficulty of using stablecoins from different issuers or across blockchain networks by managing wallets on behalf of users, Reeve Collins, co-founder of stablecoin issuer Tether, told Cointelegraph.

Magazine: They solved crypto’s janky UX problem — you just haven’t noticed yet