Web3 presents itself as a more inclusive financial system, open to anyone with a smartphone and internet access. And that’s significant progress for sure, but just because we have access doesn’t imply it’s truly safe or practical to utilize.
A user can still lose funds by selecting the wrong network, overpaying on fees or delivering assets to an unsupported destination. When the same errors are repeated regularly, however, they’re also a sign of a product problem, even if the industry calls this client error.
Open access is not financial inclusion
Permissionless access answers a relatively narrow question—can a person enter the system? Financial inclusion requires us to ask several more difficult ones. Can that person understand what they are doing, recognize a dangerous action before confirming it and use the product without first losing enough money to learn how it works?
And that’s a big distinction, because crypto’s not just for traders messing around with money they can afford to lose anymore. In places where the local currency is collapsing, inflation’s out of control, remittances are crazy expensive or foreign currency’s nearly impossible to get, crypto actually serves a real, practical need.
Take a look at sub-Saharan Africa, for example. Between July 2024 and June 2025, the region experienced $205.7 billion in on-chain value, up 51.7% over the prior year. $92.1 billion alone for Nigeria. Chainalysis said much of the activity was caused by inflation, currency devaluation, limited access to foreign exchange and the expanding usage of crypto for cross-border payments.
So for many users, crypto is a useful tool to save their money, pay people or send funds between countries. Stablecoins and blockchain payments can bring costs down by removing middlemen and speeding up the clearing process, but cheaper tech doesn’t automatically mean more accessible. If you have to understand networks, gas fees, bridges, wallet permissions, slippage, address formats and finality just to use it, then all we’ve done is redirect the complexity from the bank to the client.
Every user has an error budget
Every person using a financial product has what I would call an error budget, the amount of money they can afford to lose while learning how the product works before using it becomes economically irrational.
Consider two users who perform the same on-chain operation at the same time and each pay $25 in network and bridge fees. One’s moving ten grand; the other’s moving a hundred bucks. From the protocol’s perspective, the outcomes may be identical, but for the first user $25 is an annoyance; for the second, a quarter of the transaction has disappeared.
