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US government agencies have been actively encouraging similar ideas associated with financial literacy since 2003 when April was formally appointed the National Financial Capability Month.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has revealed a series of education events focussing on underrepresented communities and others- but indicated that competitors should be educated to practice caution while using crypto.
In an April 3rd announcement, the SEC disclosed that it would talk to communities including high school students, members of the military, investors along with native Americans to publicize financial literacy. According to the announcement, the education can be on something as useful as “how to avoid becoming a victim of fraud” using cryptocurrencies. The SEC called an alert from one of its resources, in which the regulator asked people to be mindful of assessing investments in crypto undertakings that may authorize as securities under the regulator’s jurisdiction. The quote warns investors to use only the money which they cannot afford to lose in the market.

US government agencies have been actively encouraging similar ideas associated with financial literacy since 2003 when April was formally appointed the National Financial Capability Month. The announcement followed after several people denounced the financial regulator for arguing that it expects companies to have an inclusive discussion while persisting to take rigorous enforcement actions.
US-based crypto exchange Coinbase informed on 22nd March that it had acquired a Wells notice from the SEC even after having recurrent meetings with the officials for more than thirty times in a span of nine months. The crypto exchange claimed that its products and services will resume working as usual even through the investigation.
United States Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler has offered support to the United States Joe Biden‘s proposal to allot a staggering $2.4 billion in funding for the regulator, emphasizing the present requirement to crack down on the “misconduct” in the crypto space. In testimony on March 29th budget with the House of Appropriations Committee, Gensler explained that the massive funding was required to keep pace with the innovation around the world.
Gensler requested the regulator receive $2.4 billion in funding for the 2024 fiscal year, claiming that it required a “novel tool, expertise and resource” to handle transgression in the crypto industry. United States Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is constructing her anti-crypto project as one of the main topics for her re-election campaign, even though polls indicated that the majority of Americans believe that crypto is the future.
In a tweet on March 30th, Warren also claimed that she was participating to place the administration on the middle-class families’ side, and gallantly quoted a Politico headliner that says, Elizabeth Warren is building an Anti-crypto Army.

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Sanaa is a chemistry major and a Blockchain enthusiast. As a science student, her research skills enable her to understand the intricacies of Financial Markets. She believes that Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize every industry in the world.

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Google’s chief of finance referred to the 2008 times when the expenses were growing faster than the revenue, and thus they have decided on an internal rejig in that regard.

Big-tech companies across the globe have been cutting additional costs amid the tightening macro environment. Ruth Porat, Google finance chief, said in a companywide email that the company is making cuts to employee services. In a Friday email titled “Our company-wide OKR on durable savings,” Porat said that these are multi-year efforts. Furthermore, the tech giant is willing to cut down on all the additional goodies offered to employees such as fitness classes, tape, staplers, as well as the frequency of laptop replacements for employees.
Porat added that one of the major objectives for Google in 2023 is to “deliver durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency. All PAs and Functions are working toward this,” she added.

As said, Google has been on a major cost-cutting spree while initiating one of the largest cost-cutting measures in over two decades. Earlier this year in January 2023, Google said that it was eliminating 12,000 jobs, which is 6% of its workforce.
In her email, Porat said that the layoffs were “the hardest decisions we’ve had to make as a company”. She further added:
“This work is particularly vital because of our recent growth, the challenging economic environment, and our incredible investment opportunities to drive technology forward – particularly in AI”.
She also referred to the 2008 financial crisis twice in her emails. She added:
“Back in 2008, our expenses were growing faster than our revenue. We improved machine utilization, narrowed our real estate investments, tightened our belt on T&E budgets, cafes, micro kitchens and mobile phone usage, and removed the hybrid vehicle subsidiary. Just as we did in 2008, we’ll be looking at data to identify other areas of spending that aren’t as effective as they should be, or that don’t scale at our size.”
Cutting Down on Desktop PCs
As per the internal documents viewed by CNBC, Google is pausing fresh refreshes for desktop PCs, laptops, and monitors. It’s also changing the frequency of replacing old devices.
Google employees that are not in engineering roles shall receive Chromebooks instead of Apple MacBooks. Chromebooks are Google-made laptops that come with Google’s own operating system Chrome OS.
In a statement to CNBC, a Google spokesperson said that the company’s goal is to make durable savings via improved velocity and efficiency. “As part of this, we’re making some practical changes to help us remain, responsible stewards of our resources while continuing to offer industry-leading perks, benefits, and amenities,” said the spokesperson.
Similarly, employees won’t be able to demand gadgets from the outside, if they are available internally. In case they need any gadget costing above $1,000 they would need director “or above” approval.
“These are mostly minor adjustments. We set a high bar for industry-leading perks, benefits and office amenities, and we will continue that into the future. However, some programs need to evolve for how Google works today,” added Porat.
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Bhushan is a FinTech enthusiast and holds a good flair in understanding financial markets. His interest in economics and finance draw his attention towards the new emerging Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency markets. He is continuously in a learning process and keeps himself motivated by sharing his acquired knowledge. In free time he reads thriller fictions novels and sometimes explore his culinary skills.

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User experience (UX) design affects nearly every waking moment of our lives. It’s not just digital either. Have you ever thought about the UX of doors? Perhaps a brief refresher of what UX is, will help. A useful definition of UX is as follows: ”A person’s perception and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service” (from The International Organization for Standardization).
The following opinion editorial was written by Bitcoin.com’s head of product experience Alex Knight.
Back to doors. We’ve all experienced a door that didn’t open the way it should. That’s a UX failure right there (there’s a name for such doors, search for “Norman doors”).
Thankfully Norman doors are rare, as are their computer software and web2 counterparts. Unfortunately, web3, still in its infancy, is rife with Norman doors. Until we fix most of these proverbial doors, web3 mass adoption is unlikely.
In this article I’m going to discuss three areas web3 needs to work on. Caveats: this list is not comprehensive and since my area of focus is web3 wallets I’m going to talk about UX challenges through that lens. The three areas are:

Security
Education
Ease of use

Security
That security is vital for software that handles financial instruments is obvious. Two of the bigger security challenges right now are:

Handling cryptographic keys
Unintelligible crypto transactions.

I believe that self-custody is the most important concept in crypto. This is not to say everyone must use self-custody. However, that it always remains a viable option is critical. I direct you to Bitcoin.com’s CEO Dennis Jarvis’ article on the topic for a compelling defense of self-custody. So far, self-custody has meant users must manage cryptographic keys. An early UX advancement was using recovery phrases, sometimes called seed phrases, instead of handling cumbersome unintelligible cryptographic keys.

While recovery phrases improved upon cryptographic keys, recovery phrases have proven to also be pretty complicated. There is a constant drip of stolen crypto due to people not fully grasping the importance of their recovery phrases, for example exposing or losing them. This leads to the second security problem: unintelligible crypto transactions. In most crypto scams, people willingly enter into transactions they don’t fully understand that send their cryptoassets away.
Moving Away From Recovery Phrases
Many people are working on the problem of recovery phrases. Vitalik Buterin advocates something called social recovery wallets that don’t require recovery phrases. This concept has a lot of promise, though I believe a lot more work needs to be done to make it usable for most people.
Another tactic is to replace recovery phrases with something more familiar — passwords. Just as a recovery phrase (set of random words) is more familiar than a cryptographic key (string of hexadecimal characters), a password is more familiar than a recovery phrase.
We offer automatic cloud backup services. Create a single custom password that decrypts a file stored in your Google Drive or Apple iCloud account. If you lose access to your device, you can reinstall the Wallet app on a new device, enter your password, and you’ll again have access to all of your cryptoassets. By creating a mix of encryption and cloud services tied with custodial services to help retrieve things, we can maintain a self-custody service while leveraging centralized technologies to lower the burden on the user. The ease-of-use of automatic cloud backup compared to manual backups through recovery phrases is easy to visualize:

Human Readable Transactions
Wallets need to get better at warning users of unintended outcomes of transactions. For example, a common approach is to get users to sign a ‘SetApprovalForAll’ transaction, which allows an adversary to transfer assets out of your wallet into theirs. Wallets should alert users when this kind of transaction comes up, describing the dangers clearly.
Image from @mulligan on Twitter.
Even better, wallets could present users with a more human-readable summary of potential asset changes transactions allow. For example, you might think you are swapping one asset for an appropriate amount of another, when in fact you are swapping all of your assets for nothing. The following helps visualize better what assets a potential transaction can change.
Image from @nishthenomad on Twitter
Education
There are two ways that most people first interact with blockchain technology: a centralized exchange and a self-custodial software wallet. The first time people interact with a blockchain “directly” will almost always be through the latter. Software wallets entail a large amount of responsibility and an even larger challenge in easing new users into the “deep end” of crypto – decentralized finance (DeFi).
Education is a major component of this. It’s essential for providing the right opportunities for users to upskill and build towards full self-custody and safely move away from reliance on centralized support. People being more comfortable/safe with crypto will help increase adoption and utility as it becomes a more viable alternative to traditional finance. The abundance of technical jargon doesn’t help. As is common with most new technology, early adopters are usually extremely technical.
Continuing Education
Every action your wallet has should keep in mind a future action that you wish the user to take. For example, let’s assume that the first action a new user should take upon downloading the wallet is buying crypto with fiat. You don’t want to overwhelm new users with hundreds of choices. It’s probably prudent to only give new users a curated list to purchase, with an option of the fully expanded list.

First actions, such as buy, should lead to a chain of in-app prompts/notifications/emails to try other actions like swap. Swapping is a big step from buying since every action in a DApp requires paying a transaction fee in the blockchain’s native token, something that has no analog in web2.

Jargon
Wallets are full of technical jargon that is non-descriptive to most people. A great example of this is “non-custodial wallets.” What does this mean? It has recently been adjusted to “self-custody” which is better, but still not perfect. Another is “multisig wallet.” Even knowing the full meaning, “multiple signature wallet,” will not tell already-knowledgeable people what it means. Even users who persist, digging deeper by reading full explanations, will probably have some difficulty understanding what it is and how to use it. At Bitcoin.com we use “shared wallets,” which we believe anyone can understand while not compromising the original meaning.

Ease of Use
This last category is not only one of the biggest issues we face, but is interwoven into the previous categories. As crypto matures, it must find a wider audience. The developer-driven process must make room for design. We are slowly starting to see a shift to more design-driven solutions, but there is a long way to go. Let’s look at a couple of examples, starting with mulitsig wallets.
No new user will be able to guess the usefulness of these from that name. Worse still, even advanced crypto users don’t use them because of complicated interfaces. This is tragic, because, like Vitalik Buterin co-founder of Ethereum says, multisig is likely the safest way to store your cryptoassets.

IMO fancy hardware stuff is all overrated and most people should just store the bulk of their coins in a multisig ( >= 5 participants) where most of the keys are held by trusted family and friends.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 14, 2022

Shared Wallets
First, “multisig” needs to be retired. Next, multisig options need to be stripped out for most users. Most people would abandon the process when met at a screen like this:

Sharing the newly created wallet should be as seamless as possible, unlike this:

The QR code is enough, extraneous info like the public key can be taken away:

A “share” button makes it even easier for users.

Human Readable Send Transactions
Sending crypto, arguably the most basic action one can take, is still too difficult. There have been attempts like those made by ENS, Unstoppable Domains, and FIO to solve the problem but it’s still a bit of a mess, with different providers using similar domain names and then relying on the wallet to choose which one is correct and so on.
We’ve taken a different, I’d argue easier, approach: shareable links. You don’t need to know the person’s crypto address or ENS. Instead, you send the recipient a link via any messaging app (email, Whatsapp, SMS, etc.). The recipient just has to click on the link and follow the instructions to receive the payment.

Conclusion
I have no doubt that web3 will change the world. The future is already taking shape, but suboptimal designs must be relentlessly chiseled away. I am proud of the design choices Bitcoin.com has made, but have no illusions that they are destined to be the best ones. Bitcoin.com is one of many companies making products that push web3 design forward. I can’t wait to see all of the design innovations that will have helped bring our industry to mass adoption.

Tags in this story

crypto wallet, Human Readable, Human Readable Addresses, multisig, multisignature, Non-custodial wallet, QR Codes, Seed Phrase, Self-custody, shareable links, user experience, UX, Web3
What are your thoughts on this story? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below.

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More Popular NewsIn Case You Missed It

Elon Musk recently said that he had a conversation with Sam Bankman-Fried before the Twitter deal. He also shared some predictions going forward.

The world’s richest man recently joined a discussion on Twitter with over 60,000 listeners to talk about the FTX hack and bankruptcy.
Musk revealed that he had a conversation with the exchange’s former CEO – Sam Bankman-Fried and that his opinion of him wasn’t the best.

… I got a ton of people telling he’s got huge amounts of money that he wants to invest in the Twitter deal and I talked to him for about half an hour and I know my bullshit meter was redlining. It was like, this dude is bullshit – that was my impression.
Musk said he hadn’t heard of him before that, while adding:
[…] Everyone including major investment banks – everyone was talking about him like he’s walking on water and has a zillion dollars. And that was not my impression – that dude is just, there’s something wrong, and he does not have capital and he will not come through. That was my prediction.

Later on, Musk also reiterated the importance of keeping funds on cold storage. He also said:

I think there probably is a future for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and DOGE. I can’t really speak to the others. But if you’ve got one of those three in a cold wallet and off an exchange, I think my guess is it works out well.

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FTX and FTX US wallets have been impacted in a potential hack recording over $600 million in tokens transferred by the exploiter. FTX US General Counsel Ryne Miller earlier tweeted the wallet movements as “abnormal” and the facts and reasons were unclear to him or the FTX team.

In the following tweet, Ryne Miller claimed the FTX team hurried precautionary measures to move all digital assets to cold storage after recording some unauthorized transactions. Some believe former FTX developer Samuel Hyde is behind the hack.
Former FTX Employees Behind the Hack
On-chain experts observed millions in outflow from FTX and FTX US wallets, suspected to be the start of the bankruptcy process. However, FTX employees confirmed to ZachXBT that they don’t recognize these withdrawals. Moreover, FTX Community Chat admin dropped a message in the Telegram group saying that FTX has been hacked and FTX apps are malware. The admin also urged users to delete the app and warned of possible Trojans on the FTX website.
FTX US general counsel Ryne Miller in a tweet claimed that unauthorized transactions observed by FTX led the team to expedite transfers from wallets. He pointed out that FTX US and FTX.com are required to move all digital assets to cold storage as a precautionary measure as part of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings.
“Following the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings – FTX US and FTX [dot] com initiated precautionary steps to move all digital assets to cold storage. Process was expedited this evening – to mitigate damage upon observing unauthorized transactions.”

Trending Stories

Defi and NFT project founder Foobar claimed FTX counsel noticed the black hat exploiters withdrawing tokens and swapping to ETH and DAI. Thereafter, he took white hat actions to save some funds from unauthorized transactions. Moreover, ZachXBT estimates the black hat transfers at nearly 450 million and white hat rescue from multisig at nearly 200 million so far.
Meanwhile, some claims FTX employees are behind the exploit, especially former FTX developer Samuel Hyde. While the motive is unclear, but the action may have been due to a conflict with the top leadership earlier this year.

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Tether Blacklists USDT Related to Hacker
Several on-chain data revealed that the exploiter was converting stablecoins to DAI and other crypto assets to Ethereum. As a result, stablecoin issuer Tether blacklisted $3.9 million USDT on Avalanche (AVAX) and $27.5 million USDT on Solana (SOL) of the FTX attacker, reported on-chain sleuth ZachXBT.
FTX Token (FTT) price fell to a low of $2.05 today. In the last 24 hours, the price has plunged over 35% and 90% in a week. The crypto market further slides over 3% amid the pressure due to the FTX crisis.
Read more: Over $1 Billion In Customer Funds Missing At FTX

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Varinder is a Technical Writer and Editor, Technology Enthusiast, and Analytical Thinker. Fascinated by Disruptive Technologies, he has shared his knowledge about Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet of Things. He has been associated with the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry for a substantial period and is currently covering all the latest updates and developments in the crypto industry.

The presented content may include the personal opinion of the author and is subject to market condition. Do your market research before investing in cryptocurrencies. The author or the publication does not hold any responsibility for your personal financial loss.