We think of these competing options as “crypto-native” and “crypto-enabled.” Let’s explore those two approaches in more detail.

Crypto Native

A crypto-native product is one that both assumes and requires a working understanding of crypto from the user. These products lay bare the plumbing that powers their services. They expect the user to be familiar enough with crypto to understand and evaluate the service in the context of those underlying mechanics.

This approach has enormous value–there’s a strong argument that crypto users are better prepared and better protected when they are armed with a foundational understanding of the ecosystem and the technology that powers it.

Take user security, for example. Today’s crypto users sometimes feel they’re navigating a minefield, with malicious actors laying traps at every turn. Having a baseline level of crypto knowledge can help them spot when something isn’t right and avoid unpleasant mistakes.   Beyond security, a bit of crypto savvy lets users explore the ecosystem with more agency, tailoring their activity to their interests and goals. Those who develop a basic understanding of what a smart contract is doing or what permissions they grant when signing a message are more likely to get the outcomes they want. This increase in transparency also tells the user what degree of privacy they can expect and lets them make informed decisions accordingly.

All of that is empowering. A crypto-native approach lays the foundation for a more user-driven future for the entire ecosystem–and it’s hard not to like the sound of that.

Crypto-Enabled

At the same time, it’s clear that a crypto-native approach also asks more of its users. There’s a case to be made that it might even be asking too much for the wave of newer adopters we all anticipate.

Thus, the crypto-enabled path: in contrast to the crypto-native philosophy, this approach intentionally moves crypto into the background. In these cases, crypto unlocks improved product experiences, working behind the scenes to make the product faster, better, or cheaper. But the user doesn’t necessarily know this. And they don’t need to: the product delivers whether or not the user has any idea or understanding of what is happening on-chain.

This approach has clear advantages, too. It can make for a delightful UX and provide a significant functional improvement over traditional rails. Indeed, the crypto-enabled approach has taken off with products that directly parallel popular apps today, such as peer-to-peer (p2p) payments. The builders of these products bet that instead of trying to educate users about crypto at the risk of losing them completely, the better play is to remove crypto from their experience and let the company manage the details behind closed doors.

And therein lies the rub. Users who do not understand how their activity intersects with crypto are more vulnerable to mistakes. The complexity inherent to crypto is where much of the risk lies, and without users knowing some fundamentals of how the product is leveraging crypto, they may be blind to hacks or abuse.

There are also downsides for more seasoned crypto users. These users may feel walled in by the decisions or assumptions that the product makes on their behalf–and they may resent the inability to kick the tires for themselves. For example, we see crypto-enabled products creating wallets in the background and not sharing the address, chain, or asset that facilitates the transfer of value. Faced with such obfuscation, crypto-native users often will balk. Whether new users will flock to products that more seasoned users have shunned might be a risk that crypto teams are not willing to take.

Walking the Line

Of course, these tensions are not new to crypto. The same struggle defined the early days of the web when builders debated whether the average consumer would need to understand things like URLs and the difference between a POP3 and IMAP email setup. By and large, abstraction won out in that context–users ultimately traded transparency and control for simplicity and ease. Venmo doesn’t share how the $50 you sent to your friend for dinner ended up in their bank. It just happens. Why should crypto be different?

There are a couple of reasons. First, times have changed since the early days of the Internet. Then, the entire online experience was new, arriving as it did with the birth of personal computing. Today, everyone is online, carries a computer in their pocket, and generally has a higher technical proficiency.  What’s more, although we’ve landed at a high level of abstraction now, it’s important to remember that we only got here after years of collective education. And finally, perhaps most importantly, there’s still the question of what we gave up to get here. Might we all have done better navigating our new online lives if we had insisted on a higher level of digital ownership? Think of the scams, data leaks, and privacy intrusions we all could have avoided if we had.

This brings us back to the question for crypto. Today’s average internet user may not understand how Venmo works, but why should they? The technicalities don’t make much difference to them–Venmo controls all of that. But the same user migrating to crypto has more choices. They have the possibility of self-custody and interoperability across tools to be employed as they see fit. They don’t have to give up autonomy to a centralized firm just as the price of admission. Why should we make it seem as if they do?

Total abstraction might have been a good trade when centralization was necessary to navigate the internet. When that’s no longer the case, the fundamentals of that bargain begin to look a little more shaky.

Conclusion

The clear takeaway is that it’s not a simple choice. Neither crypto-native nor crypto-enabled will be the right solution for all products, and there will inevitably be a spectrum that each company will have to navigate.

At Meso, we don’t have all the answers either. We want to make crypto a welcoming environment for newcomers, to be sure. But also know that over-simplifying crypto makes it less powerful. For crypto’s potential to be fully realized, users must understand how crypto-based platforms differ from traditional online apps–not just functionally but also from a values-based perspective. Only when they can see those differences clearly can they evaluate how much they matter.

As with most things in life, it will have to be a balance. Crypto’s breakthrough into the mainstream will be blazed by the builders that get this balance right.

But for those brave enough to try, there’s another factor at play, one that looms larger than the rest: on-ramps are fundamentally about trust. And with all the challenges of building in this space, trust is often the hardest thing to get right.

Products for People

On-ramps are part of the larger landscape we call consumer fintech—financial products designed to help regular people manage, move, and invest their money in innovative ways. It’s an exciting space to build. Most of the Meso team has been immersed in this side of fintech for years, developing new consumer tools at places like Venmo, Coinbase, and Snap.

One thing we know from those experiences: working on the consumer side raises the stakes. There’s a specific kind of responsibility you take on when you build for individuals, because the impact of your work is not abstracted through layers of business processes. It’s immediate. You are interfacing directly with people and asking them to trust you with their money. Your mistakes can be their disasters.

The User Impact

The struggle to be worthy of this trust is ever-present in consumer fintech, and there are plenty of reasons it’s hard to do. Companies in consumer fintech face rapidly changing regulations, fast moving competitors, and constant threats of fraud—not to mention managing a host of behind-the-scenes platforms that must often be stitched together to power the front-end experience. With all of those forces at play, it can be an uphill battle to make all the pieces fit. Sometimes, something just has to give.

When that happens, trust is often the first thing to be compromised, and it’s users who pay the price. They have their money frozen due to poorly configured risk rules or can’t even sign up for the product in the first place because of over-sensitive KYC processes. They might get double-charged because of a bug in the code that didn’t quite get fixed, and they lose time, money, or both in trying to get the issues resolved.

Consider a payments company that promises your money will arrive “instantly” - and days later, you’re still waiting. Maybe you planned to pay rent with that money, and good luck getting the company to pay your late fees or deal with the hit to your credit score. Or maybe you send money to a family member for an emergency, but the payment arrived too late to be helpful. Would you keep trusting a company that puts you through that?

To the company, edge cases like those may seem minor in the short term. We’ve wrestled with such situations ourselves, and we know the trade-offs that lead to those outcomes often feel inevitable. But we also know that in the long term, sacrifices in user experience will always undermine trust. When it comes to their personal finances, people will not keep using a product they don’t trust.

Building Trust for Crypto

That’s not to say that success is impossible. On the contrary—many consumer fintech brands have earned trust, becoming household names and common verbs in their own right.  We’ve been lucky enough to be part of a few of those success stories, and the lessons we’ve learned have been formative.

It’s our firm belief that for the next phase of crypto to succeed, it needs those lessons too. And on-ramps are the perfect place to start. Right now, the promise of crypto is stymied by barriers of access to and from the ecosystem. To unlock that promise, users need fast and cheap ways to transfer money into and out of blockchains, using products that they know they can trust.  If the aim is that using crypto becomes as easy as sending an email, users can’t be expected to settle for a coin-flip’s chance of success that any given transaction will even work.

This is the problem Meso is solving. Our years of experience working in consumer fintech give us the know-how to build great products, but—perhaps more importantly—they also give us the deep respect for user trust that has been our north star since we started building a year ago. That’s why we’re taking the time to build a user-centric foundation from the start, and why we will continue to prioritize the voice of the user as we grow. Learn more about Meso by following us on Twitter.

We know that crypto on-ramps can be great. But to get there, we know that they have to be built on trust. If we get it wrong, users may lose faith in this critical portal to the ecosystem and walk away entirely. But if we get it right, we can help open the world of crypto to a whole new generation of users.

That’s the power of trust.

For the last year, we’ve been building Meso, a fast and safe way to move money between your bank and self-custodial wallet.

Today most users onboard to crypto via exchanges. Exchanges offer the seamless payment experience that users expect coming from web2, with instant movement, low fees, and minimal friction. But this is only possible because users don’t have custody of their assets.

Meso’s goal is to give crypto developers access to the same seamless payment experience that exchanges have used to onboard millions of users—without sacrificing self-custody.

On-ramps are broken

The problem today is that self-custodial on-ramps are broken. Redirects, complex authentication processes, and time-consuming ID verification flows result in high levels of drop-off. If users do make it through those hurdles, they often still face payment declines in the final step. Unlike web2, where making a payment is the end point of the experience, crypto users must on-ramp to even begin onboarding to products. You don’t get very far in the ecosystem if your wallet is empty.

That’s why on-ramps are so critical for user adoption and retention. They are pivotal moments in the user experience—and they are also one of the most highly regulated. Optimizing for conversion while staying compliant is both an art and a science.

Meso’s primary goal is to improve this conversion, focusing on three core components: speed, cost, and trust.

• Speed—Fiat payments are slow. Specialized payment platforms are necessary to move money instantly and reliably into and out of crypto.

• Cost—Users shouldn't have to pay a hefty tax to move their own money. Fees must start low and decline even further at scale, while providers constantly innovate to keep the cost of fraud in check.

• Trust –Transferring money between financial accounts can be nerve-racking for users. They must trust payment providers with their sensitive data and their funds, and providers must earn and keep that trust.

There are considerably more problems to confront in time. These are three of the most pressing that Meso helps solve, right out of the gate.

A New Path On- and Off-Chain

Meso’s team has deep experience building global payments infrastructure that power products like Venmo, Uber, Airbnb, and Github. Our founding team comes from early-stage engineering and product teams at Braintree, which was acquired by PayPal in 2013. We are energized by applying all we learned from this formative fintech experience to crypto and making Meso an integral piece of the ecosystem.

With our on-ramp product launch, we tackle the core conversion problems inhibiting crypto growth today. We do this by offering fast and reliable payments with instant ACH, low fees, and a trustworthy UX.

• Instant ACH — Right now, cards and crypto don’t mix. Declines are high, and so is user frustration. Meso offers an alternative payments rail optimized for low cost and high success. We get there by owning fraud risk decisions and providing instant delivery of crypto to self-custodial wallets.

• Low fees — With our customized crypto-specific risk engine, we’ll offer industry-leading low fees from the start. Continuously improving our fraud reduction capabilities will help drive fees even lower in the future.

• Trustworthy UX — Our UX is meticulously designed around users’ needs at every stage. A best-in-class UI and reliable product are table stakes for Meso, but we’re not satisfied with nailing the basics. Instead, we’ve built an entire experience centered on generating trust and eliminating the pain points that we know from firsthand experience can frustrate users and limit adoption. Using message signing to verify addresses, reducing data collection, and adding innovative security protocols to keep users safe are just some of the enhanced features users can expect with Meso.

Just the Beginning

We founded Meso because of our own frustration trying to move money in and out of wallets. At launch, Meso solves many pain points associated with the on and off-ramping process, but we’re just getting started. There are many more ways to use blockchains, smart contracts, and self-custody to make fiat more compatible with crypto. We’re excited to keep exploring those possibilities alongside the wider community and build solutions that scale for all crypto users.