At WalletConnect, our goal is simple: to make interacting with crypto as intuitive as any everyday task. While we recognize the current challenges, we are committed to ensuring that “it just works” through ongoing improvements and collaboration with our partners and community.
Our industry has the builder spirit of Linux & the stability of Microsoft. But to revolutionize web3 UX, akin to Apple’s customer-centric approach in web2, we must refine every aspect. This evolution is essential to onboarding consumers (“crypto’s first billion”) & applications that go beyond financial apps.
Today, we’d like to acknowledge community sentiment (Example 1, Example 2) around WalletConnect quality and what the issues are now and in the past. We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear regarding these challenges, and we’re actively addressing them. We are also diligently exploring root causes and collaborating closely with our partners to address specific challenges users may be experiencing. Let’s delve deeper into these efforts.
Current Issues and Root Causes
While WalletConnect generally performs reliably across most apps and wallets, users sometimes encounter hurdles, especially in poor network conditions, due to variance in wallets’ adoption of our best practices.
Common issues include:
(Perceived) Latency
Our SDK’s position in the boot chain can lead to up to 15 seconds in throttled network conditions. Lack of loading indicators exacerbates the perceived latency issues, impacting user experience negatively.. Additionally, users often do not receive error messages or codes when issues occur or timeouts happen.
Success and Error Messages
Users often face ambiguity in determining whether their connection or transactions were successful. They are also not guided to switching back into the dapp or automatically switched back when possible, causing unnecessary user anxiety. Additionally, wallets typically lack status indicators for connection and internet availability, leaving users in the dark.
Old SDK Versions
We fixed numerous bug fixes in recent SDK updates (especially in the past year), but many dApps and wallets continue to use older SDK versions with known issues, affecting overall reliability.
Improving these issues is a top priority for us at WalletConnect. That’s why we are communicating diligently with apps and wallets using older SDK versions with known bugs.
While progress can be hindered by app store review processes and iterative updates from partners, it’s been getting much better over the past few months and continues to get better.
T̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶o̶n̶ Latency is web3’s new frontier
It goes without saying that latency is a crucial piece of UX. Here are two standards that we have diligently worked on, which are currently adopted, that show the way for future web3 UX.
Batch Transactions (EIP-5792)
Minting an ENS currently requires three transactions, which means switching into the wallet three times. A simple swap usually requires an approve step and then the actual transaction. EIP-5792 turns this into just one action for end-users and thus significantly improves the latency across web3.
1-Click Auth (CAIP-222)
About 30% of the top 1000 EVM dapps use Sign-in-with-Ethereum to log in their users. We also get requests for Sign-in-with-Solana. Currently, this requires two context switches: connecting the wallet and then signing a message. 1-Click Auth turns this into just one interaction. This is the first one of many CAIP-222-based 1-Cick standards. In the future, you can imagine 1-Click-Checkout, 1-Click-KYC, and other use cases to improve latency even further.
Link Mode
Link Mode is a latency improvement where we use Universal Links as the transport mechanism instead of our internet-based Relay. The caveat is that it only works with native dapps, which are currently limited in number. We are just launching link mode with a smooth migration path for dapps and wallets. Soon, you will be able to experience its benefits firsthand.
