The UX Gap In Stablecoin Payments

Transcript

Oh sorry. Yep. All right. Uh, yeah. Thanks for being here, everyone. Can take this. Uh, I'm Melie. I'm partnerships manager at INAS Labs and we're going to talk about the exciting topic of stable coins today. Surprise. And the premise that stable coins are scaling very fast. But when it comes to the recipient UX, it's still broken compared to traditional finance. And we're going to focus on the

missing layer which is the human readable uh recipient identity. Before we start, I saw a tweet today that kind of fit very well. So, stable coins are usually being framed as completely separate from uh crypto. And yeah, even though um people really try to separate like treat both as two different products, the truth is that we can learn a lot from the crypto ecosystem. And we've been here for many many years and we have a lot of knowledge to pass on to um yeah industries that come in and yeah want to make crypto their own.

Especially when it comes to new payment products and like neo banks and uh fintech apps that want to use stable coins. um these should not ignore the lessons that we have learned and the things we have built to um yeah improve their apps. So one example is EOS who uh allow salaries to be paid as stable coins. Now the question is would you receive your salary with this? Would you trust an HR person who has never touched crypto to send you your salary every month to a raw address?

And um technically it works. It works perfectly fine. But this is not what a trustworthy payment experience looks like. And that is what makes this whole thing interesting because um stable coins do improve on traditional uh payments. They're faster, they're global, they settle onchain, and they remove a lot of the friction and delays that we experience with banks and bank transfers. Stable coins are in many ways better, but many of the payment products actually are still failing at the recipient layer compared to bank transfers.

And if we compare a simple bank transfer, we usually have a name that identifies the recipient. We have the account and we have a centralized institution layer that verifies that these two match and that the recipient is the right one. And then if you look at stable coin transfers nowadays, um that whole burden of verifying the recipient falls upon the user and the user only has one verification layer which is as you can see here the copied address. So most of the time the UX also just shows the first four and last four characters of the address and uh we do not need to add more complexity by showing the whole

address and all the characters. But what we can do is add a readable identity layer that is tied onchain to the recipient address. And this pattern already exists today. Um most of the major wallets that you use and exchanges already uh have done this before and we continue improving this uh together. And a few products also decided to just use the name and remove the raw addresses completely because the moment a user sees a name as a destination address the perception of the transaction just changes completely and becomes more trustworthy and

understandable. So usernames are useful but usernames inside your app are not enough. The real unlock is the interoperability that comes with an um naming layer. So in banking, I can send money to someone even though they don't use uh the same bank as I do. The payment works for all banking systems. And that concept applies to onchain transactions as well. And it's even faster and secure. But when it comes to the identity layer, it needs to follow that same concept. So, if a PayPal user wants to you uh send USDC to a MetaMask user on the other

side of the world, they can do it via an onchain name like an ENS name. If um Coinbase exchange user wants to do the same and send um tokens to a Rainbow Wallet user, that should also work with a name that transfers across and works across all applications. So interoperable names is where um the real unlock lies and this is especially important because the a bad recipient UX does cost a lot especially for platforms. Um one of the many causes of course is oh it's not moving.

So all humans saying the wrong source and um mistype things and basically yeah user error is one of the biggest causes of lost funds on exchanges and wallets. And then we have of course the the slides are not moving. I'm not sure why. Let me try here.

It's not working. Should I use a different screen? >> It's working on my screen. It's just not working here. But yes, um bad recipient UX is the the issue. And uh we have user error. So people copy pasting the wrong address. Um and I would love to show you the graph that I have here.

So, user errors and then obvious scams like uh address poisoning, lookalike addresses, um people yeah just being scammed overall and the whole trust failure of um letting humans verify addresses that they are not even able to read easily. Oh wait. go to this and then presentation the Wi-Fi.

Okay, let's use my let's use my PDF uh file. Yeah, I can do that. I'm so sorry, guys. >> I'm connecting to my own hotspot now because I don't think it's working. messages

losing funds due to send sending it to the wrong address. And no wallet and exchange will actually tell you how many funds or how much uh is being lost every month through this very primitive problem. But we do have some uh public research by people like Block 8 who have um the data data online. And so if you look up their articles, you can see that from for example 2025 until 2026, uh we are moving in the millions. And now you can imagine that this number is actually bigger than uh or this one is actually smaller than the reality. And if institutions and fintech apps and neo banks come in, it will only rise if they

don't get the basics down. Now what can platforms do? Warn your users. Um, have as many visual cues as possible in your apps. Audit uh your product features regularly to reduce the surface for address poisoning as much as possible and offer your users and another layer to verify the destination address. Um, and then as a user of course don't use uh addresses that you see in transaction histories. Don't copy them blindly. Um, and always use trusted sources. And then of course, if it's possible, verify the name and the address. And if you use an app that does

not offer you a second verification layer for sending tokens and assets, then ask for it. Be loud about it because these are your funds that are at risk and safety should not be a vanity feature. It's foundational infrastructure and should be treated as such. So not um stable coins are improving a lot from uh compared to traditional uh payments. They're faster, they're onchain, but it cannot be that in 2026 uh when it comes to the UX, stable coin transfers are still lagging behind bank transfers when it comes to actually

knowing who we are sending money to. And that's it. happy to connect. I'm so sorry >> very much. Thank you very much. >> Yeah. Anyone has a question for Melly? Yeah. If not, we're gonna be moving to uh Yakub Yak.