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Gas Fees? What Gas Fees? Web3 UX Finally Works Like It Should
- Jul 7
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 7
How Web3 apps finally removed the blockers and started working for real users
Gas used to be the price you paid for trying. Whether it was sending tokens, minting NFTs, or using a DEX, every action came with a cost and confusion. Fees spiked, confirmations lagged, wallets crashed, and apps asked for approvals most users didn’t understand. The problem wasn’t just technical. The experience made people walk away before they got started.
Across Ethereum’s busiest periods in 2021, the average gas fee soared beyond $60 per transaction. Even simple tasks like approving a token for the first time required extra clicks, guesswork, and tutorials. For many users, especially those new to the space, the barriers felt intentional.
What’s changed is the interaction layer. Transactions haven’t disappeared. Gas hasn’t either. But the way users engage with Web3 apps has been rebuilt quietly, gradually, and with more attention to friction than fanfare.
A swap on Base now costs less than a penny. Account creation on Farcaster requires nothing more than an email. Transaction fees can be paid in stablecoins, hidden behind a flat fee, or sponsored entirely by the app. These aren’t pilots or betas. They’re running in production across live platforms.
According to L2Beat, Ethereum Layer 2s now handle over 60% of the network’s total activity. That number keeps rising not because the chains are fast, but because they no longer make users feel like they’re solving a riddle. The changes came through small shifts in defaults: embedded wallets, automatic fee coverage, fewer pop-ups, and smoother sign-ins.
What mattered wasn’t new infrastructure. What helped was removing the friction that had no reason to be there.
Layer 2 Made Gas Cheaper and UX Smarter
Transaction fees used to dominate the conversation. Now, most of the progress is happening in how users engage with apps—not what they pay to use them.
The cost of using Ethereum fell dramatically with the growth of Layer 2 networks like Base, zkSync, and Optimism. But the impact runs deeper than fee reduction. These networks introduced new design standards that shifted the attention from cost to clarity.
On Base, the average fee to send tokens now hovers around $0.002. Swaps cost less than $0.03. But those numbers only matter when the experience is smooth from the first click to the last confirmation. That’s where the transformation has been most effective.
Before, users had to approve tokens, guess gas limits, calculate slippage, and switch between tabs just to complete one action. Each step invited drop-off. Each mistake cost money. Now, many of those steps are abstracted away by default.
One-click transactions. No manual gas setting. No chain switching. The network is still public and decentralized, but the path through it is finally clean.
According to data from L2Beat, Layer 2s now process over 60% of Ethereum’s total transactions. Not a coincidence. It's a reflection of how much friction has been removed without asking users to understand the mechanics behind the scenes.
The conversation has moved from "how do I send ETH without overpaying?" to "why does this work so easily now?" And that shift has been long overdue.
Embedded Wallets Are Finally Doing Their Job
For years, wallets were the first hurdle. Users were told to install browser extensions, write down seed phrases, approve permissions they didn’t understand, and fund gas manually before they could even try a dApp. None of it felt like a normal signup process.
The entire model assumed people would show up already equipped with the tools. But most never got that far. The drop-off at the wallet step was massive. According to Dune data from 2022, fewer than 15 percent of first-time visitors to major DeFi apps ever completed a transaction. Most left before connecting a wallet.
That flow has started to change.
Embedded wallets now come built into the app. There’s no extension to install. No seed phrase to save. No wallet switch prompt mid-session. Instead, users sign in with an email, social account, or passkey. A non-custodial wallet is quietly created in the background, ready to use immediately.
Tools like Web3Auth, Privy, Magic, Capsule, and Turnkey are powering these invisible layers. Their SDKs are now integrated across hundreds of apps, including growing platforms like Farcaster, Blackbird, Warpcast, and Friend.tech.
This model removes friction without removing control. Users still hold keys. But the interface behaves like something built for regular use, not for technical validation.
The experience also opens the door for mainstream use. With embedded wallets, a first-time user can interact with a blockchain app without even realizing it’s a blockchain. They sign in, confirm once, and move on. The system works without needing to be explained.
Many of the most used consumer-facing apps in Web3 have already switched to this approach. Friend.tech is built entirely on smart contract wallets. Farcaster handles wallet creation behind the scenes using CustodyKit and Privy. Blackbird uses embedded wallets to offer loyalty and payments through a single interface that never asks the user to approve a contract directly.
What changed wasn’t the security model. It was the expectation. Embedded wallets brought the blockchain interface closer to how people already use technology. That’s why adoption is rising across apps that offer them by default.
The shift didn’t come from marketing. It came from removing what never needed to be there.
Smart Accounts Are Actually Being Used
For years, account abstraction sounded more like a proposal than a feature. The pitch made sense on paper—flexible permissions, programmable transactions, native gas abstraction—but most users never touched it. Now, that has changed.
Smart accounts are live across Ethereum Layer 2s. They’re handling real transactions on real apps with real volume. The difference is not in the headlines—it’s in how the experience feels.
The old way required users to approve every action. Even something as basic as swapping tokens meant three steps: approve the token, confirm the transaction, and manually cover gas. Smart accounts cut this down to one clean action. The logic lives inside the account itself, so the contract can process multiple tasks without needing a separate approval for each one.
Safe, Biconomy, Pimlico, and Stackup are among the providers powering this shift. They enable batched actions, gasless interactions, session keys, and even delegated execution—all without asking users to understand what’s happening underneath.
As of mid-2025, more than 3.2 million smart contract wallets are active across Ethereum and Layer 2 networks, according to data compiled by Dune and Etherscan. That includes deployments for consumer apps, DAOs, wallets, and enterprise dashboards.
Developers are building with smart accounts because they make the app more usable. No more wallet popups for every click. No risk of a failed transaction halfway through a multi-step process. No friction when onboarding users who expect a single approval to mean everything is done.
This pattern is already visible on platforms like Zora, Lens, and Friend.tech. It’s being used to batch minting actions, combine token approvals with swaps, and enable social functions like follows, likes, or posts—all without interrupting the user.
Smart accounts are making apps feel less like testbeds and more like finished products.
Apps Are Finally Built to Be Used Without a Manual
Web3 wasn’t struggling with scarcity. It was overwhelmed with complexity. The tools existed, the capital was there, and interest wasn’t lacking. What kept users out was the design.
Apps assumed too much. They expected users to bring their own wallet, know which network they were on, adjust settings like gas and slippage, and understand how approvals worked across different protocols. The result was predictable—users either gave up or made costly mistakes.
That pattern has started to reverse.
The most used Web3 apps now lead with clarity. They offer clean onboarding, fewer decisions, and automatic fee handling. Many feel less like wallets and more like products. The blockchain is still under the hood. The interface no longer demands the user to know that.
Uniswap Mobile lets users swap tokens with a few taps. The interface doesn’t ask for network switches. The app handles routing. On the backend, Layer 2 networks like Base and Optimism take care of execution.
Farcaster’s clients don’t present a wallet connection screen on startup. Instead, they ask for a username and let the user post, follow, and engage. A wallet is created silently in the background, managed through Privy and CustodyKit. The user never has to touch seed phrases or gas menus.
Friend.tech combines smart contract wallets with social features. Every action is permissioned once. After that, the app handles the logic internally. No second approvals. No gas rejections.
All three examples share one pattern—they’re live, used daily, and built around actions, not explanations.
More importantly, they’ve removed the need to ask, “What do I need to understand before I can start?” Instead, they offer something much more useful: the ability to begin without instructions.
That’s what good UX should have done from the start.
Tokenized Assets Need UX That Works Without Instructions
Large institutions are moving into tokenized finance, but they’re not dragging old processes into new wrappers. What’s being built behind the scenes is only useful if it can be accessed without complexity—and right now, that means simplifying everything from custody to execution.
Over the past 18 months, firms like Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, and WisdomTree have issued tokenized money market funds and treasury-backed assets on public chains. These aren’t just pilot programs. The assets are live, and their token flows are measurable on-chain.
According to rwa.xyz, the total value of tokenized U.S. treasuries surpassed $1.8 billion in June 2025. These assets are not being traded through command-line interfaces or cold wallets. They’re integrated into dashboards, settlement rails, and fintech platforms where the user doesn’t need to approve transactions or fund gas manually.
What connects these use cases is how invisible the complexity has become. Transaction fees are handled behind the curtain. Wallets are embedded and abstracted. The interface feels like a brokerage account—even though the engine running it is open and verifiable.
These products aren't appealing because of the chain they're built on. They're gaining attention because they reduce friction while maintaining access and transparency. That blend only works when the interface doesn't fight the user.
From a technical standpoint, this requires smart contracts, embedded wallets, and stablecoin-denominated flows. From a user perspective, none of that matters. They get a clean portal. They don’t see pop-ups. They don’t lose track of gas or network fees.
That design logic is bleeding into retail-facing dApps too. When DeFi, tokenized funds, and app chains all start following the same interface conventions, adoption becomes less about onboarding and more about utility.
That’s the convergence taking place. Not between chains, but between expectations.
Real Usage Is Finally Outpacing the Narrative
For years, the conversation around Web3 ran ahead of its usability. Headlines focused on what might be possible. Meanwhile, the experience often broke down before the first transaction.
That pattern is no longer holding.
Across consumer apps, payments, and on-chain media platforms, usage metrics are climbing. The difference now is that growth is not coming from speculative activity alone. It’s coming from actual interactions that complete without errors, rejections, or support threads.
Farcaster has passed 300,000 active handles. Most were created without forcing users to install a wallet. They post, follow, and comment through interfaces that load in seconds and require no explanation.
Friend.tech has crossed one million accounts. It runs entirely on smart contract wallets. Onboarding is handled through embedded flows. Once inside, users don’t have to think about approvals or gas settings. Everything is processed through a single interface built around social engagement.
On Base, transaction counts have steadily increased without being inflated by bots or bridge spam. According to data from BaseScan and Dune, more than 70 percent of daily transactions on the network come from consumer-facing apps—most of which abstract wallet setup, gas funding, and transaction sequencing.
In all these cases, the usage is measurable, and the interfaces have been simplified down to a few consistent actions: sign in, tap, approve once.
There’s no handbook, no wallet dropdown, no reminder to write down a phrase before using the app.
What connects these examples is the consistency. Actions map to outcomes. Errors are rare. Completion rates are up. People are using the products, not just testing them.
That’s what adoption looks like when the tools finally start listening to the user.
Design Finally Outpaced Hype
For a long stretch, Web3 applications looked like concepts built to win funding decks not actual usage. Everything had promise, but little was finished. Onboarding broke often. Transactions failed without feedback. Users felt like testers.
That phase is now giving way to something more deliberate.
Interfaces are cleaner. Wallets are backgrounded. Steps have been reduced. What used to require a thread on social media now happens in three taps.
Design won here by listening more than building. The best UX improvements came from removing what never needed to be there in the first place.
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For a quick video version of this post, watch my YouTube video: Gas Fees? What Gas Fees? Web3 UX Is Finally Doing Its Job
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