The best blockchain products won’t look like crypto, says Alexander Belanov
Consumer blockchain is going through a strange phase: the technology itself is fading from view. By spring 2026 there were around 62 million active smart accounts on Ethereum and its Layer 2 networks, and apps had covered roughly $180 million in transaction fees so users never had to think about them. The consensus call on this year’s breakout consumer apps is blunt: they won’t market themselves as crypto at all. They’ll just feel like fintech.
Alexander Belanov, a fintech entrepreneur and blockchain developer, has spent his career on both sides of this trade-off: he led engineering at a cryptocurrency exchange, where custody was the product, and has since built non-custodial tools where users hold their own keys. The biggest change of 2026, he argues, isn’t a new chain. It’s that the wallet is disappearing as something users have to think about.
“People didn’t keep money on exchanges out of trust,” Belanov said. “They kept it there because the alternative asked them to become their own security team. Back up twelve secret words, buy a separate token for fees, approve transactions you can’t read. Custody was never really a preference. It was a verdict on our UX.”
Two standards did most of the work. ERC-4337 turned accounts into programmable smart contracts, and EIP-7702, which shipped in Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade in May 2025, lets an ordinary wallet borrow those powers without changing its address. MetaMask and Trust Wallet added support through 2025. In practice: sign-in with Face ID instead of a seed phrase, fees the app can sponsor, several approvals in one tap, and a lost phone that no longer means lost money.
The names driving adoption are familiar ones. Coinbase’s Smart Wallet and Safe account for most active smart accounts, Circle’s paymaster lets fees be paid in USDC rather than ETH, while consumer apps such as Polymarket and Farcaster, shipping gasless sign-up out of the box, have become the fastest recruiters of new users.
“The right mental model is just a normal app account,” he said. “You log in with your fingerprint, the app absorbs small fees the way it absorbs server costs, and recovery works the way people already expect it to.”
The next layer, chain abstraction, goes further. Instead of picking a network, bridging funds and signing every step, a user states an outcome, say, send £20 to Anna, and solver systems such as UniswapX and CoW Protocol compete to execute it across whichever chains make sense, under a cross-chain standard backed by Uniswap and Across. Dozens of Layer 2s, for years crypto’s ugliest UX problem, turn into an implementation detail.
“Nobody asks which database their banking app runs on,” Belanov added. “When users stop asking which chain, the infrastructure has finally started doing its job.”
The direction now has institutional weight. The Ethereum Foundation’s 2026 priorities name native account abstraction and interoperability as the network’s top usability priorities, with smart wallets as the default end state. Belanov’s advice to founders is to treat this as product design, not ideology. Start onboarding with a passkey, not a lecture on self-custody; budget sponsored transactions like marketing spend, since gasless first sessions are now the cheapest way to acquire users; use session keys so a game or a subscription doesn’t interrupt people every few minutes; and pick a chain the way you’d pick a database.
“The question I find interesting has changed,” he concluded. “It used to be, how do we teach people crypto? Now it’s, what can we build once the plumbing is invisible? The milestone isn’t a million wallets downloaded, it’s a million people using an on-chain product without ever learning the word wallet.”
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