In brief

• Permissionless access shows only that someone can enter the financial system, she argues, while inclusion depends on whether they can use it safely.
• Every user has an "error budget": a $25 fee is an annoyance on a $10,000 transfer and a quarter of a $100 one.
• Sub-Saharan Africa recorded $205.7 billion in on-chain value in the year to June 2025, according to Chainalysis, with $92.1 billion of it in Nigeria.

Web3 presents itself as a more inclusive financial system, open to anyone with a smartphone and internet access. And that's significant progress for sure, but just because we have access doesn't imply it's truly safe or practical to utilize.

A user can still lose funds by selecting the wrong network, overpaying on fees or delivering assets to an unsupported destination. When the same errors are repeated regularly, however, they're also a sign of a product problem, even if the industry calls this client error.

Open access is not financial inclusion

Permissionless access answers a relatively narrow question—can a person enter the system? Financial inclusion requires us to ask several more difficult ones. Can that person understand what they are doing, recognize a dangerous action before confirming it and use the product without first losing enough money to learn how it works?

And that's a big distinction, because crypto's not just for traders messing around with money they can afford to lose anymore. In places where the local currency is collapsing, inflation's out of control, remittances are crazy expensive or foreign currency's nearly impossible to get, crypto actually serves a real, practical need.

Take a look at sub-Saharan Africa, for example. Between July 2024 and June 2025, the region experienced $205.7 billion in on-chain value, up 51.7% over the prior year. $92.1 billion alone for Nigeria. Chainalysis said much of the activity was caused by inflation, currency devaluation, limited access to foreign exchange and the expanding usage of crypto for cross-border payments.

In the next preview chapter of our 2025 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report, we analyze Sub-Saharan Africa's crypto market: 52% growth to $205B, making it the world's 3rd fastest-growing region.

See how Nigeria and South Africa are driving institutional adoption while retail… pic.twitter.com/UVlCfZwpzc

— Chainalysis (@chainalysis) September 10, 2025

So for many users, crypto is a useful tool to save their money, pay people or send funds between countries. Stablecoins and blockchain payments can bring costs down by removing middlemen and speeding up the clearing process, but cheaper tech doesn't automatically mean more accessible. If you have to understand networks, gas fees, bridges, wallet permissions, slippage, address formats and finality just to use it, then all we've done is redirect the complexity from the bank to the client.

Every user has an error budget

Every person using a financial product has what I would call an error budget, the amount of money they can afford to lose while learning how the product works before using it becomes economically irrational.

Consider two users who perform the same on-chain operation at the same time and each pay $25 in network and bridge fees. One’s moving ten grand; the other’s moving a hundred bucks. From the protocol's perspective, the outcomes may be identical, but for the first user $25 is an annoyance; for the second, a quarter of the transaction has disappeared.

Blockchain protocols do not know the client's income, savings or financial situation, nor should they. Products, however, often know enough about the transaction to recognize that something is wrong. They can see the amount being transferred, estimate the network fee, compare available routes, calculate the expected amount on arrival and sometimes identify that the selected destination does not support the chosen network.

Despite this, many interfaces continue to present technical decisions as though all users have the same capital, experience and tolerance for loss. They do not. Fixed and unpredictable costs are naturally more damaging to people sending smaller amounts, while irreversible mistakes carry greater consequences for clients with limited savings. The less capital someone has, the smaller their error budget becomes.

So a financial system that requires several expensive lessons before it can be used safely may be open, but openness alone does not make it inclusive.

Self-custody should not mean self-abandonment

None of this is an argument against self-custody. I just want to say that clients should not have to give up control simply because the technology beneath their money is complicated. The crypto industry often presents a false choice: either a centralized platform controls the experience, or the user is left to manage every technical and security decision alone.

In practice, self-custody can mean managing keys, recovery phrases, gas tokens, networks, approvals, bridges and backups. Clients get financial freedom, along with a workload that would normally be handled by several teams inside a bank. So the experience can feel like a strange deal—here is your financial freedom, try not to click the wrong button. The point is that control over assets and assistance from a product are not mutually exclusive.

A self-custodial product can detect incompatible networks, explain permissions in plain language, simulate the outcome of a transaction, flag a fee that is disproportionate to the amount being sent and make dangerous actions look meaningfully different from routine ones. It can recommend a safer route without taking control of the funds.

This is one of the reasons we have been building ChangeNOW beyond its original role as an instant exchange and transforming it into an all-in-one crypto platform. A crypto super app's purpose should be to reduce the number of technical decisions users must make just to complete an ordinary financial task. Buying, storing, exchanging, sending, trading or growing funds may depend on very different infrastructure that operates in the background, but the client should not be responsible for connecting every part of it.

Repeated user error is product data

Of course, users still have their own responsibilities. No financial product can prevent every bad decision, stop every attack or cancel every transaction that's already gone through. Web3 comes with real trade-offs, and pretending otherwise—acting like it's totally risk-free—would just be dishonest. But responsibility isn't black and white. One person can make one bad call on their own, but if the same kind of mistake keeps happening across different clients, that's probably a sign something in the product itself could be better.

The industry's default response is often education: read the documentation, watch the tutorial, learn how gas works and understand the difference between a network, wallet, bridge and exchange before sending your money. Education matters, but it cannot excuse predictable failure modes. Sending $100 should not require a minor degree in distributed systems.

If users repeatedly confuse the same networks, another article is not enough. If they approve permissions they do not understand, a longer disclaimer is not a solution. If the true cost only becomes clear after confirmation, the interface is not providing informed consent.

Financial freedom cannot be pay-to-learn

Web3 has already done something pretty hard: built open financial infrastructure that works globally, outside the traditional banking system. The next priority isn't as flashy to talk about on stage, but it is way more important for real-world adoption: making this stuff actually usable without forcing everyone to become a total expert.

This means building products that bring fragmented tools into clear experiences, prevent predictable mistakes and help clients achieve a financial outcome rather than simply complete a blockchain transaction. It is also the direction we are pursuing at ChangeNOW as we build a super app. The point is not to hide Web3 or take control away from the user. It is more about taking responsibility for the complexity that products have spent too long pushing onto them.

The next billion users should not need enough disposable income to survive the Web3 learning curve. Financial freedom cannot mean that access is open while the cost of learning is priced for the wealthy. Web3 will become genuinely inclusive not when anyone can open a wallet, but when ordinary people can use one without an expensive mistake being the mandatory price of admission.

Pauline Shangett is Chief Strategy Officer at non-custodial crypto platform ChangeNOW.