Web3 promises financial sovereignty for everyone, but its current design tends to reward only those wealthy enough to absorb costly errors, argues ChangeNOW chief strategy officer Pauline Shangett in a new commentary on the industry's usability problem.
The Cost of Self-Custody
The core promise of decentralized finance is that individuals can control their own money without intermediaries. Yet that freedom comes bundled with unforgiving consequences. A mistyped address, an approval signed to a malicious contract, or a lost seed phrase can wipe out an entire balance with no recourse and no customer support line to call.
For users with deep pockets, these risks are an acceptable cost of doing business. For everyone else, a single misstep can mean losing everything. That imbalance, Shangett contends, means the technology's benefits accrue disproportionately to those who can afford to fail and try again.
When the same mistake happens to enough people, it is no longer user error — it is a design flaw.
Rethinking Where Blame Lands
A central argument in Shangett's piece is that the industry too often labels recurring problems as "client error." When the same misstep surfaces across large numbers of users, she says, that pattern becomes product data that developers and platforms should treat as a signal to fix their interfaces.
Shifting responsibility from the individual to the product design would push builders to create systems that anticipate human behavior rather than punish it. That means clearer transaction previews, safer defaults, and guardrails that catch dangerous actions before they become irreversible.
The stakes are high for adoption. If Web3 wants to serve the mainstream rather than a niche of sophisticated, well-capitalized users, its tools need to tolerate the ordinary mistakes people inevitably make.
Key friction points the commentary highlights include:
- Irreversible transactions with no safety net for common errors
- Confusing interfaces that obscure risky approvals or transfers
- A tendency to blame users instead of improving product design
Building for Everyone
The broader takeaway is that true financial inclusion requires more than open access to decentralized rails. It demands products designed with the assumption that users will err, and that resilience should be built in rather than treated as a premium feature reserved for the risk-tolerant.
Until that shift happens, Shangett suggests, Web3's rhetoric of universal financial freedom will remain out of reach for the very people it claims to empower.