Blockchain technology provides creators with an opportunity to build ecosystems that aren’t governed by central authorities, have continuous uptime, and can provide resistance to censorship. The technology also has a capacity to redefine the underlying incentivisation mechanisms of the web — for example, it could fundamentally change internet advertising, and therefore could perhaps break Facebook and Google’s stranglehold of the ads most of us experience on the web. This won’t happen without mass adoption — and mass adoption won’t happen until the technology matures. The barriers of entry for consumers need to be lowered, and user-experience needs to vastly improve.

There are many examples of how decentralised technologies could majorly change the internet, but let’s first focus on advertising, as it is of huge importance to the internet as it stands. In 2017, Google’s ad revenue amounted to almost $95.4B, accounting for over 70% of company’s revenues . In the same year Facebook generated almost $40B from advertising, which accounts for over 90% of its total revenues.

Advertisers serve ads based on audience data purchased from service providers. In exchange for accepting exposure to ads, consumers enjoy access to content, and services such as search engines, email accounts, social media profiles, and data storage space.

The way consumers are rewarded for being exposed to ads isn’t sophisticated. Whether a user uses Google 200 times a day, or just 2, they both get the same email account and storage facility, for example. Apart from being provided with ‘free’ products and services, consumers don’t experience any share from the advertising revenues Google or Facebook make. Blockchain networks can re-define the modus operandi of the advertising market in favour of the consumer, and therefore constitute a threat to companies that rely on ads as their main source of revenue. Enter the Basic Attention Token.

The promise of the Basic Attention Token (BAT) is to enable users to select types of advertising they want to see, and get paid for being exposed to it. The value is distributed very differently, with ad-consumers receiving most of the advertising revenues (70% as per BAT white paper). Users will be able to purchase services (such as data storage, app subscriptions etc), with the revenues received; and are able to reward content creators with the tokens they have earned. BAT is working on many partnerships, ranging from deals with independent YouTube producers to giants such as the Washington Post. With high adoption rates, such redistribution of advertising value could shake the foundations on which some of the biggest technology companies are built.

There are many other examples of how decentralisation could redefine value distribution (Refereum), monetisation of resources (Filecoin), work (Numerai), and how an entire business organisation governs itself (Aragon).

But for the BAT (and other tokens) to really work, they need mass adoption. This is where I foresee a big problem. There are numerous factors preventing blockchain technologies from achieving the mainstream adoption. With many, transaction times are extremely slow; ID-verification procedures to purchase even the most popular digital assets are cumbersome; and if capital is sent to the wrong email address, or if a password or private key is lost, there are no recourse procedures to address this.

Transacting on the blockchain is currently ‘all or nothing’. At present, the benefits of blockchain, cryptocurrencies and the decentralised internet are balanced by an equal amount of risks for an everyday user. Consumers aren’t used to accepting this level of risk on the ‘centralised’ internet, so why would they do so now?

Steve Krug defined the key principles of user-experience in his excellent book, ‘Don’t Make Me Think’. To simplify: usability is key — being able to use a product without finding the process frustrating or annoying; and the product should be self-explanatory.

To pick an example, this is true of Storj. It is essentially an alternative to Dropbox, which offers users a cheaper more secure way to store files over a decentralised network. However, unlike Dropbox, it takes approximately 30 minutes to just read the instruction manual explaining how to install the application enabling to use it. The set-up process is also complex, labour intensive, and includes manually generating an encryption key. In short: not user friendly.

Storj is just one example, but it is indicative of many. At this early stage, pretty much all blockchain products are in breach of Steve Krug’s principles. Ray Kurzweil calls this the “false pretender” phase of evolutionary development. The new tech has some advantages but, at present, too many disadvantages to replace or even challenge the status quo. Mass adoption is unlikely if the technology doesn’t overcome the massive user experience flaws. Interaction with the blockchain protocols needs to be as intuitive and responsive as online banking, DropBox, PayPal, or sending an email.

The blockchain space is the most challenging to work in from a user experience perspective, but it is also virgin ground, and there would be great rewards to reap for those who manage to solve it.

Some have already started to tackle these challenges. One of them is Metamask, which is a Chrome and Brave browser extension that enables users to interact with an Ethereum wallet with vastly improved UX, and browse the decentralised web in a standard browser. Another protocol that could enable a more seamless interaction with the blockchain ecosystem is 0x: a protocol that enables exchange of tokens in ‘the background’, via an API layer.

Looking to the future, I envisage that most tokens will operate as a ‘back-end’, and users will rarely have to directly transact with them. It’s difficult to imagine that today’s easy online purchasing could be replaced by a necessity to have a wallet full of various volatile tokens, each for different purposes. However, it’s plausible to see those new protocols become as ‘invisible’ as other protocols of the web — such as http, ftp, or smtp — but with powerful value exchange mechanisms attached to them.

It’s hard to tell if breakthrough user experience improvements such as these are just around the corner, or if solving the underlying technological challenges contributing to the negative UX will take over 10 years to address.

One thing is certain, once we get there, the blockchain technology — and products built on it — will stand a good chance of redefining everything we know about the internet, perhaps even challenging the current power-structures and destabilising the monoliths.