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When FTX collapsed in 2022, it didn’t just vaporize billions of dollars in customer funds; the exchange’s implosion shattered confidence in the centralized architecture in much of the crypto economy. And with court battles still ongoing in 2025, including plans to return $1.9 billion in disputed claims, it’s a reminder that trusting middlemen in a trustless ecosystem can be a risky contradiction.
Summary
- The self-custody market is surging post-FTX, projected to grow from $1.5B in 2023 to $8.4B by 2032, driven by both institutions and retail users.
- On-chain data shows users shifting from centralized exchanges to DEXs, with spot volumes falling 16.3% while DEX activity rose 6.2% in early 2025.
- UX remains the industry’s bottleneck — wallets and dApps often confuse users with jargon, poor recovery, and hidden centralization.
- Fiat-to-crypto on-ramps are crypto’s front door; smooth, compliant rails are essential for adoption and trust.
- The next 100M users will come not from new protocols but from an intuitive, safe, and invisible design that makes web3 feel seamless.
In the aftermath of FTX’s collapse in 2023, the self-custody market was already worth $1.5 billion and projected to hit $8.4 billion by 2032. This wasn’t just a temporary response to the crisis; it signaled a deeper shift in people’s mindset. Users wanted tools that put them in control.
It is perhaps no surprise that users are seeking to reclaim control. Many have moved their assets to non-custodial wallets, seeking safety in their own personal responsibility where they can hold their own keys and shoulder their own risk.
The numbers behind a behavioural shift
Spot trading volume at the top ten centralized exchanges decreased by 16.3% quarter-on-quarter from $6.5 trillion in Q4, 2024, to $5.4 trillion in Q1, 2025. Meanwhile, volume on the top 10 DEXs increased by 6.2% over the same period, recording a total of $700.7 billion in Q1, 2025, up from $660 billion in Q4, 2024, according to CoinGecko. On-chain data clearly shows a growing appetite for self-custody, and long-term holders are accumulating over 19,000 bitcoin each month, according to Glassnode.
This is no longer a panic. According to Chainalysis, the uptick now includes both institutions and retail users shifting to self-custody by choice. They aren’t guided by fear; they’re seeking control, transparency, and autonomy.
The narrative is no longer about bank runs. It’s about a new paradigm where crypto users are designing trust out of the equation altogether. But in escaping trust-based systems, many users have collided with a new kind of barrier: design complexity. Self-custody may promise autonomy, but for the average user, it can deliver confusion. If 2022 was the year people woke up to the risks of centralization, the reality in 2025 still shows a usability gap at the heart of crypto’s most important tools.
What began as a migration of assets has become a stress test for the industry’s design priorities. And many wallets, dApps, and protocols still aren’t quite ready for the next wave of users now holding their own keys.
What most crypto teams still get wrong about UX
But while the shift to self-custody is accelerating, crypto’s front-end still lags behind its promise. For all the innovation under the hood, most wallets and dApps can, to the uninitiated, seem built more for insiders rather than everyday users.
Recovery processes can be unforgiving. Jargon is rampant, and interfaces can still feel like puzzles. A 2024 usability study found that users can struggle to perform even basic wallet functions due to unclear instructions and unfamiliar design patterns, highlighting a significant disconnect between technical design and real-world comprehension.
Too many DeFi protocols still prioritize token mechanics over user flows, treating UX like a coat of paint on a protocol, not a fundamental design challenge. Even worse, some self-custody tools lean heavily on centralized Remote Procedure Call providers or default to cloud backups that give users a false sense of control. Research shows that despite blockchain’s promise of decentralization, users often still depend on centralized trust anchors like leading infrastructure services, contradicting blockchain’s fundamental promise of trustless interactions.
UX and on-ramps are crypto’s front door
Here’s the irony: the tools with the greatest potential for user empowerment can be among the hardest to use. Ideology isn’t onboarding new users; a clean UX is. Winning products aren’t just shipping new features; they’re rethinking how crypto should feel. But before users can benefit from great UX, they have to get into the ecosystem in the first place. That’s where the fiat-to-crypto bridge becomes essential.
Fiat on-ramps are the front door to web3. They shape the first impression. If they’re slow, confusing, or require too much technical knowledge, users may never return. A smooth, compliant on-ramp doesn’t just help users obtain access to crypto; it builds trust from the first click. That’s why the infrastructure layer between traditional finance and digital assets matters so much. The most successful wallets and dApps often owe their growth not only to smart features, but to well-integrated fiat access.
Seamless, KYC-compliant payment rails are helping to power this transition, enabling users to obtain access to cryptocurrency using a bank debit or credit card, or seamless services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. This kind of infrastructure is what lays the foundation for scalable, real-world adoption that meets users in familiar environments before guiding them into self-custody.
MetaMask is making strides with built-in swaps and bridging, cutting down the app-hopping that once defined DeFi. Wallets such as Trust Wallet have embraced intuitive app design, offering features like biometric login, in-app swaps, and seamless browser extensions, in a way that some might say mimics what has worked so well for TradFi apps for years. Originally launched in 2017, Trust Wallet’s usability has helped drive the wallet to over 17 million monthly active users and more than 200 million total downloads as of 2025. But as strong as the tools themselves are, it’s the entry point that defines the journey.
Decentralization was never binary
If better UX is lowering the barrier to self-custody, it’s also exposing a deeper truth: many users aren’t evangelists for pure decentralization. They want systems that feel safe, clear, and reliable, even if that can mean accepting some trade-offs.
Great UX doesn’t mean dumbing crypto down. It’s about communicating risk, surfacing trust signals, and creating confidence even when the backend is messy. You shouldn’t have to decode hex strings to verify transactions. Interfaces should surface risk and intent clearly, guide users through recovery safely, and give you the confidence of feeling in control even when the backend infrastructure is shared. That’s the trust design challenge that crypto has yet to fully embrace.
The next 100 million users
The next 100 million users won’t show up for a new chain or a novel protocol. They’ll come when wallets are impossible to misplace, when dApps speak a human language instead of a protocol code, and when safety becomes hardwired into the applications. Crypto began as a rebellion against trust, but for the industry to scale, it needs to feel trustworthy. That’s not a scalability problem.
For the industry to scale, it must confront two realities: people believe in decentralization as an idea, but demand usability as a condition. The winners of the next cycle won’t be the most permissionless or most programmable; they’ll be the ones who make web3 invisible. That means building seamless fiat-to-crypto gateways, intuitive self-custody tools, and apps that meet users where they are today.
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