Killing the seed phrase
Twelve random words on a scrap of paper is the single largest tax on onchain adoption. It is not a security model — it is a transfer of liability from the product to the person least equipped to carry it.
The seed phrase is a product failure
Every wallet that shows a seed phrase during onboarding is telling the user: if you get this wrong, we cannot help you, and your money is gone. No other consumer financial product opens with that sentence.
The fix is not better copywriting around the phrase. The fix is removing the moment entirely and replacing it with something the device already does well.
Passkeys do the boring part
Passkeys move key custody into hardware the user already trusts — Face ID, a fingerprint, a device PIN. The signing key never leaves the secure element, and the user never sees a string of words.
Practically, this collapses onboarding from seven screens to one: tap continue, confirm with your face, you have an account.
Smart accounts do the interesting part
Once the account is a contract rather than a raw keypair, recovery becomes a policy instead of a prayer. Guardians, time-locked resets, and social recovery all become normal settings screens.
Sponsored gas belongs here too. A first transaction that asks a new user to buy a second token in order to move their first token is a funnel with a hole in the middle.
The one-sentence test
Our internal bar: a user must be able to explain how they would get back into their account, in one sentence, without using a crypto word.
"My phone signs for me, and my sister can help me reset it" passes. "I wrote down twelve words" does not.