Crypto features are now just features: payments, memberships, tipping, and identity flows that happen to touch a chain. Before you ship anything, spend ten minutes with the Crypto Without the Fog column and notice how often the hard part is not code, but incentives and expectations. On the web, the moment you add irreversible value transfer, your product stops behaving like a normal app. This guide focuses on the parts that fail in production and how to design them to fail safely.
The Real Problem Isn’t “Crypto” — It’s Irreversibility
Most web products assume mistakes are fixable. Users can reset passwords, support can roll back a charge, and an admin can restore an account. Crypto flows invert that assumption: the “undo” button often does not exist. That changes what “good UX” means.
A clean UI that hides complexity can still be dangerous if it hides the consequences. People don’t read warnings; they read outcomes. If your product makes it easy to sign the wrong thing, the best-case result is churn. The worst case is a user who loses money and blames you forever, even if the protocol “worked as designed.”
Your goal is not to make crypto feel magical. Your goal is to make it predictable. Predictability is what turns fear into trust.
Start With a Threat Model, Not a Wallet Button
If you start with “Connect Wallet,” you’re already late. Start with a threat model that matches your actual users.
Ask three blunt questions:
1) What valuable action can a user perform in your app?
2) What is the simplest way an attacker can trick them into performing it?
3) What could your support team realistically do after it happens?
You’ll often discover that the main risk is not a sophisticated exploit. It’s social engineering, phishing, fake approvals, and “helpful” browser extensions. Your app sits inside a chaotic environment: tabs, popups, Telegram links, screen-shares, and people under time pressure. Your design has to survive that reality.
Treat “user error” as a normal case, not an edge case. Then build guardrails around it.
Custody Choices Quietly Define Your Risk Profile
Every crypto product makes a custody decision, even if it pretends not to.
Non-custodial is attractive because you don’t hold user funds. But non-custodial does not mean no responsibility. You still influence what users sign, when they sign, and whether they understand what happened. If your UI encourages blind signing, you created risk without holding keys.
Custodial can simplify UX, but it centralizes blast radius. That means your security posture must look more like a fintech than a typical startup: hardened infra, strict access control, audit trails, incident response, and a real strategy for account recovery and fraud.
There’s also a hybrid reality: session keys, delegated permissions, relayers, smart accounts, and “walletless” onboarding. These can reduce friction, but they also create new failure modes: confused consent, silent approvals, and invisible spending power.
A practical rule: minimize what a single compromised click can do. If one approval can drain everything, you will eventually meet the day that click happens.
Authentication: Make It Hard to Steal Accounts and Easy to Recover Them
Account security in crypto products is weird because “account” can mean two separate things: the web account (email, sessions, roles) and the on-chain identity (keys, signatures, permissions). Attackers will go after whichever is easier.
If you rely on passwords, you are choosing to fight an old war. Passkeys are not perfect, but they raise the baseline and reduce phishing success dramatically because they are bound to the legitimate origin. A solid starting point for why this matters is Google’s explainer, It’s Time for Passkeys, which frames the shift as a practical response to the reality of credential theft.
Even with passkeys, you still need to get the basics right: session handling, rate limits, device trust, and sensitive-action re-authentication. The OWASP guidance in the Authentication Cheat Sheet is boring for a reason: the boring attacks are the ones that keep working.
Recovery is where most teams get crushed. If you offer no recovery, you will lose normal users. If you offer weak recovery, you will get account takeovers. The goal is a recovery flow that is slow, auditable, and hard to socially engineer. “Instant recovery via email link” is not recovery; it’s a gift.
Transaction Safety: Guardrails That Respect Human Behavior
Users do not think in hex strings, contract addresses, or gas details. They think in intentions: “I’m subscribing,” “I’m swapping,” “I’m sending.” Your UI must translate the technical action into the user’s intention and confirm the match.
If you only show raw wallet prompts, you are outsourcing clarity to the least user-friendly part of the experience. The wallet prompt is the final gate, not the primary explanation.
Here are guardrails that consistently reduce disasters without turning your app into a lecture:
- Use an address book and safe contacts so repeat actions go to known destinations, not fresh copy-pasted strings.
- Show human-readable intent (“Approve token X for contract Y up to Z”) and highlight what changes after the action.
- Warn on first-time interactions with a new contract, especially when the action grants ongoing permissions.
- Default to limited approvals where possible; “unlimited” should never be the silent default.
- Add friction for high-risk actions (cooldowns, extra confirmation, or re-auth) instead of relying on a tiny warning line.
- Explain failure states clearly (“You rejected the signature,” “Network congestion,” “Insufficient balance”) and offer safe next steps.
Notice what’s missing: vague fear messaging. Users ignore “Be careful.” They respond to specific and actionable information.
Observability and Support: Design for the Day Things Go Wrong
A crypto product without observability is a support disaster waiting to happen. When users say, “My funds are missing,” they usually mean one of five things: they signed something they didn’t understand, the transaction is pending, they switched networks, they interacted with a different address, or a UI bug displayed stale state.
Build internal tools that let your team answer questions quickly without asking users to become blockchain analysts. Good support UX includes:
- Clear transaction history with links to explorers.
- Status states that match reality: pending, confirmed, reverted, replaced.
- Detectable network context: chain, token, contract, and address.
- A “copy debug info” button that includes non-sensitive context.
- Strong messaging about what support will never ask for (seed phrases, private keys).
When you treat support as a first-class feature, you reduce panic, churn, and public accusations. You also protect your own team from being forced into improvisation during incidents.
What to Build Next: A Practical Path That Compounds Trust
If you’re adding crypto features to a web product, prioritize the work that compounds.
Start with safer authentication, clearer intent, and limited permissions. Then build recovery and support tooling. Only after that should you chase fancy onboarding shortcuts. Speed is not your advantage if it creates invisible risk. The teams that win long-term are the ones that make users feel calm.
If you want a simple internal rule for roadmap decisions, use this: every new feature must either reduce a failure mode or add clear value without increasing irreversible risk. If it does neither, it’s noise.
Crypto doesn’t need more hype. It needs products that behave like grown-ups: transparent, resilient, and honest about tradeoffs. Build that, and you won’t need to beg for trust — it will accumulate.
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