Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways The crypto industry faces a critical challenge: outdated wallet infrastructure that undermines security and user trust.
Beyond cosmetic changes, the industry acknowledges the need for a fundamental redesign to ensure safe, user-friendly and self-custodial crypto management.
For all the talk about “decentralization” and “empowerment,” the cryptocurrency industry has ignored the one layer every user touches: the wallet. Blockchains get upgrades, protocols get rewrites and AI agents get hyped to the moon, but the thing people rely on to hold their money and identity is still a browser plugin glued together with warnings and hope.
It’s almost comical how many of crypto’s biggest failures trace back to this. Hacks blamed on “user error.” Blind-signing scams that empty wallets in seconds. Seed phrases that disappear in apartment moves or get phished out of inboxes. Entire ecosystems are built on infrastructure that collapses the moment a tab freezes or a spoofed UI pops up.
And the worst part? The industry treats all of this as normal. Wallets get dressed up with new UI or a shinier extension icon, but underneath, they’re built like SaaS products pretending to be self-custody. A website outage, a compromised iframe or a vendor failure is all it takes to expose users who thought they were “sovereign.”
This isn’t a niche problem; it’s the problem. The one quietly shaping public perception, killing adoption and giving regulators endless ammunition.
Everyone loves to talk about mainstream users, but no one wants to face the obvious truth: No mainstream audience will ever trust a system that expects them to memorize magic words and pray their browser doesn’t betray them.
The dam finally cracks
At Devconnect in Buenos Aires, this tension was impossible to avoid. Behind all the AI-agent talk and real-world-finance buzz, conversations kept circling back to the same topic: The wallet layer is broken, and the market has reached the point where patching it won’t cut it.
... continue reading