Crypto's Real Design Problem Is Not Usability
About This Conversation
A conversation with Kyle Becker about crypto UX (user experience), institutional finance, and why blockchain design needs to focus on systems strategy.
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Conversation
Herb
Kyle, in your earlier crypto work, including the UX (user experience) in Cryptocurrency report and your essay on Web3 in 2023, you seemed to argue that crypto’s real bottleneck was not merely bad UX, but unclear usefulness once speculation was removed. Now, in 2026, the industry looks more mature on the surface: stablecoins are closer to regulated payment infrastructure, account abstraction has softened some of the old wallet pain, ETFs (exchange-traded funds) have made crypto legible to institutions, and banks are absorbing parts of the stack.
Institutional assets on-chain at J.P. Morgan.
I was super excited to see J.P. Morgan and Blackrock’s public announcement about their on-chain collateral management pilot.
I worked on the interface for the initial pilot of this product during my time with J.P. Morgan Onyx—the company’s blockchain-focused division. This particular project solved a major (and expensive) painpoint for complex trading organizations: collateral management.
High-frequency investors managing large portfolios need to maintain collateral for their leveraged positions (usually risk-free assets like bonds). Each day as the market value of their portfolios change, they need to increase or decrease the collateral that backs those positions. This collateral management task requires hundreds of people who set values for assets, manage yields on them, and move them back and forth between different custodians.