by Phoebe Beigbeder – July 1, 2025

Web3 doesn’t have a tech problem. It has an interface problem. Mainstream adoption won’t be unlocked by better protocols – it will be driven by better design. This deep dive explores why mobile is the key to onboarding the next billion users into Web3. From Robinhood’s behavioral revolution to the rise of embedded wallets, smart contract accounts, and crypto-native smartphones, we unpack how the mobile experience is transforming not just how users interact with finance but also who gets to participate in it. If DeFi is to scale, it must leave the desktop behind.

Join our author Phoebe on July 2 at the EthCC main conference in Cannes, where she’ll discuss Web3 adoption alongside Coinbase and Rebind. You’re building mobile-first? Reach out!

TL;DR

The next wave of adoption will come not from better protocols, but from better experiences designed for where users already are: on their phones.

• Mobile is the default interface for financial behavior.
• Robinhood redefined investing through frictionless mobile UX.
• Mobile-first design drove mass retail participation in markets.
• Robinhood drove 20 -25% of U.S. retail trading volume.
• Stripe, Coinbase, and Solana are investing in this shift.
• Mobile-first or even mobile-only DeFi apps such as Rebind are entering the stage.
• Active mobile wallet users grew 23% yoy, from 27.9M to 34.4M.
• Embedded wallets eliminate the need for seed phrases and simplify the onboarding process.
• Account abstraction enables secure, gasless, mobile-native DeFi.
• Solana Mobile launched its own fee-free, crypto-native app store.

“Add to Home Screen” – Finance defaults to mobile

The transition from desktop to mobile has quietly become one of the most important changes in how people access financial services. The mobile phone is no longer a communication device. It is a behavioral anchor where people check balances, make payments, invest capital, and increasingly, access financial products that were once the domain of institutions. The mid-2010s marked a significant shift in user behavior, with smartphones becoming the primary tool for managing finances. Over 80% of Americans now use financial apps for banking, budgeting, or investing, and a similar trend has been observed in Europe, with nearly 70% of adults preferring digital interfaces for managing their finances.

The clearest proof of this transformation is the rise of Robinhood, a mobile-native platform that didn’t just digitize brokerage, it redesigned investing as a habit, a game, and a social experience.

As we enter the next phase of digital finance, the DeFi space must confront a hard truth: What Web3 lacks is not architecture, it is adoption, and that adoption will only come when the product meets users where they already are. For the next billion users, that place is mobile.

“Touch to Trade” – Robinhood and the mobile reshaping of market behavior

To grasp what’s at stake in Web3’s mobile evolution, we first need to recognize the magnitude of Robinhood’s impact. Founded in 2013, Robinhood did not build a better brokerage platform in the traditional sense. Instead, it redefined what investing could feel like. Its app prioritized mobile usability from day one, with fast, visual, frictionless features, and did so during a moment when the financial world was still desktop-centric.

The story of Robinhood is not simply one of fee disruption; it is one of behavioral architecture. From its inception, Robinhood positioned itself as a mobile-native platform, designed not to augment desktop experiences but to replace them entirely. Robinhood recognized this shift before its competitors did and capitalized on it by crafting a product experience that was simultaneously gamified, intuitive, and radically accessible. The app’s design distilled complex market interactions, including buying equities, tracking performance, and managing a portfolio, into a few taps on a screen. It supported fractional share purchases, simplified performance charts, and used visual elements such as confetti and progress badges to reinforce user engagement. 

In 2015, Robinhood had just 500,000 users. By 2021, it had surpassed nearly 23 million funded accounts, peaking at 18.9 million monthly active users and was driving over $1.6T in annualized equity trading volume (for comparison, the total value of stocks traded in the U.S. in 2022 reached approximately $44.3T). The platform’s user growth had outpaced legacy brokers, fueled by an onboarding model that made participation nearly frictionless. Importantly, Robinhood was not built for the sophisticated trader but for everyone else. 

The “retail revolution” was not born from Wall Street; it was downloaded from the App Store. Its design choices made it possible for a 22-year-old to invest in fractional shares of Amazon with the same fluency as ordering food or sending a message. 

The result was a surge in retail trading participation. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, Robinhood alone helped push U.S. retail trading to nearly 20–25% of total equity volume, a dramatic increase from under 15% just a few years prior. This wasn’t just a change in participation rates. It was a shift in financial identity. Millions of users who had never touched a brokerage account before were now managing portfolios from their smartphones. Robinhood turned passive consumers into active participants in capital markets, and it did so almost entirely through mobile.

Crucially, the behavioral effects of mobile-first investing extended far beyond user acquisition. Studies conducted during this period revealed that equities heavily exposed to Robinhood users exhibited greater price volatility, often in response to trending social media topics. GameStop’s infamous January 2021 spike, where trading volume exceeded 200x its normal level, was in large part a byproduct of Robinhood’s viral interface, Reddit-driven discovery, and frictionless access.

Robinhood’s influence extended beyond the U.S. The mobile-first design paradigm rapidly propagated to Europe and beyond, shaping the architecture of a new generation of financial platforms. In Germany, Trade Republic launched in 2019 with a smartphone-only strategy, achieving over 150,000 users in its first year and scaling to 8 million users and €100B in assets by 2024. Its user base dwarfed many traditional banks and investment firms, highlighting the appetite for commission-free, mobile-accessible investment products.

In the U.K., Revolut integrated trading into its banking superapp, combining crypto, equities, and foreign exchange under a single mobile interface. By 2024, it had more than 52 million users globally, with nearly a million active retail investors in the U.K. alone. Like Robinhood, these platforms built user flows around mobile gestures and instant feedback loops, reinforcing trading behavior with every tap.

Perhaps most consequentially, these platforms forced incumbents to react. This “democratization” has compelled incumbents to reduce fees and invest in improved digital services, solidifying mobile apps as the primary interface for retail market access. Meanwhile, regulators and market operators began to view retail platforms not as fringe players but as essential components of liquidity provision and risk propagation. Robinhood and its peers had not only democratized investing; they had become market participants in their own right.

“Loading…” – Web3’s mobile lag and opportunity

Despite having more resilient, open, and composable infrastructure than traditional financial systems, DeFi remains underpenetrated, especially on mobile. Its biggest obstacle is not technology, but accessibility. While mobile-first platforms like Robinhood have brought in tens of millions of users by minimizing friction, DeFi continues to suffer from a product stack that alienates all but the most technically inclined or committed users.

New users attempting to interact with DeFi face an experience stacked with barriers. They must install browser extensions, configure wallets, manage private keys or seed phrases, acquire gas tokens in unfamiliar currencies, and navigate a UI grammar filled with unlabelled icons, strange protocol names, and intimidating jargon. None of this translates to mobile UX standards. And none of it reflects the seamless onboarding or dopamine-positive design that made Robinhood addictive and intuitive.

The mobile gap in DeFi becomes even more critical when we examine the current users. On CeFi platforms like Coinbase, retail users account for nearly 86% of revenue (Coinbase Form 10-K, p. 95). Despite this revenue opportunity, DeFi protocols still largely fail to capitalize fully on mobile, the primary channel for retail engagement. Closing that gap isn’t just an optimization; it’s the key to unlocking the next wave of adoption. For example, the decentralized derivatives exchange Hyperliquid managed to generate impressive traction targeting DeFi-native users; however, at some point, in order to continue growing and competing with CEXs like Binance, they will need to shift their attention towards a broader retail audience, favoring mobile. As mentioned above, Robinhood peaked at 18.9 million monthly active users, while Hyperliquid has so far attracted an aggregate of only 500,000 users since its launch.

And yet, crypto mobile usage is slowly picking up. a16z recently reported a 23% year-over-year increase in active mobile wallet users, from 27.9 million to 34.4 million in May 2025. 

This primarily relates to infrastructure innovations beneath the interface. The rollout of account abstraction, particularly Ethereum’s EIP-7702, enables gas-sponsored transactions, programmable smart contract wallets, and seamless interactions that feel invisible to the end user. No longer must users switch networks, hold native tokens, or confirm manually each time. Smart contract wallets can manage rules of engagement, including when to sign, how to route, and how to recover, making DeFi mobile interactions safer and more fluid.

A key development unlocking mainstream crypto adoption is the rise of embedded wallet tools, such as Privy, Turnkey, and Dynamic, that radically simplify onboarding. These wallets enable users to create self-custodial accounts using familiar methods, such as email, phone number, or social login, thereby eliminating the need for 12- or 24-word seed phrases. Instead, they rely on passkeys, biometrics, and social recovery. Under the hood, security remains strong: providers use secure enclaves, multi-party computation (MPC), or Shamir’s Secret Sharing to ensure no single party, including the provider, holds the complete private key.

This model has made the “wallet layer” nearly invisible. Signing into a DeFi app now feels like logging into any modern fintech product. But while the UX is vastly improved, there’s a tradeoff: fragmentation. Most embedded wallets are generated per app, meaning users may end up with different wallets across services. Unlike MetaMask or Ledger, which offer portable keys across Web3, embedded wallets prioritize ease per app, sometimes at the cost of continuity. While some projects are working on cross-app linking, fragmentation remains a challenge to solve.

We also see improvements in mobile security: users are wary of public Wi-Fi threats, where attackers can spoof networks and inject malicious prompts. Real incidents have involved wallet drains after users logged in over unsecured networks. Other risks include phishing malware, particularly on Android, where fake overlays can steal credentials. Fortunately, the ecosystem is catching up. Mobile wallets now use secure enclaves and biometrics by default. MPC-based wallets, such as ZenGo, eliminate seed phrases entirely, thereby removing single points of failure. Account abstraction introduces smart features like spending limits, time delays, and social recovery. Combined with OS-level protections, VPNs, and 2FA, these tools are helping to close the security gap on mobile devices.

These changes unlock a future in which DeFi products can finally be designed as mobile-first experiences. No extensions, no education campaigns, no bootcamp tutorials. Just taps, flows, outcomes. This shift is not theoretical. Major fintech players are already aligning behind it. Stripe recently acquired Bridge & Privy, signaling its intent to build wallet infrastructure directly into its payment rails. Coinbase has integrated DEX functionality directly into its mobile app, blurring the boundary between centralized and decentralized rails.

For Web3, this means the battle is no longer a technological one. It is behavioral.

“App Upgrade” – Why mobile-first DeFi will outperform CeFi

To understand the opportunity in mobile-native DeFi, we must revisit what CeFi offers and what it doesn’t. Centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance dominate today’s onramps for one reason: simplicity. They abstract wallet management, provide fiat access, and offer a clean, usable experience. But beneath that polish lies a series of trade-offs: custodial control, limited token access, opaque pricing, and exposure to platform risk. As with Robinhood in equities, CeFi is optimized for usability, but its architecture is fundamentally closed.

DeFi, by contrast, is open at every layer. Users can interact directly with liquidity pools, lending markets, synthetic assets, derivatives, and governance mechanisms without requiring permission and without relying on a custodian. Strategies are not locked behind financial advisors; they are composable through onchain smart contracts. Access is global. Settlement is atomic. The risks are transparent, not hidden in the terms of service.

But these advantages have meant little to most users because the UX is years behind. The DeFi experience has been built for experts, not for everyday participants. That’s now changing.

Modern DeFi apps are beginning to deliver not just parity with CeFi but strategic superiority. With account abstraction, mobile-native wallets, and native fiat bridges, DeFi platforms can offer:

• Instant access to thousands of tokens (vs. a few hundred on CEXs)
• Native yield on stablecoins (without needing third-party banks or staking services)
• Real-time composability across lending, liquidity provision, and asset management
• True self-custody with intuitive recovery and embedded security protocols
• Instant global access, not siloed by App Store rules or national restrictions. A truly borderless UX: China, the U.S., or Germany, same rails, same experience
• Onchain auditability, where risk is visible, not hidden

Unlike CeFi, where users are platform-bound, DeFi users can exit, fork, or migrate without friction. In a post-FTX world, this distinction matters more than ever.

At the edge of this transition sits a new breed of DeFi platforms, such as Legend, DeFi.App, Lootbase and Greenfield’s investment Rebind (see recent backing post). Those mobile-first (or even mobile-only), self-custodial DeFi apps are not built for the Web3 elite, but for anyone with a smartphone. They remove all traditional points of failure: no seed phrases, no clunky browser flows, no confusing wallets. From the first interaction, users can earn stablecoin yield, access 2,500+ tokens, use fiat onramps, and bridge between chains, all behind a UX that feels as smooth as Revolut.

What they represent is that DeFi can be powerful without being painful. That mobile-native doesn’t mean “just shrink it down,” but “reimagine it from the ground up.” And that the future of decentralized finance will belong to whoever makes it feel invisible.

With its mobile devices, Saga and the upcoming Seeker, Solana is a first mover in this direction. Solana blends smartphone UX with the security of a hardware wallet. Private keys are stored in a secure element called SeedVault, which signs transactions internally without ever exposing the key to memory. Users confirm actions with a fingerprint, just like Apple Pay. The Solana dApp Store, pre-installed on the phone, charges no fees and allows unrestricted access to DeFi, NFT, and payment apps. Developers can publish freely, without App Store gatekeeping. With over 170,000 Seeker phones pre-sold and cross-chain support expanding, Solana Mobile is demonstrating that there’s demand for crypto-native mobile hardware that prioritizes user control and composability.

The Progressive Web App (PWA) Infinex is utilizing another innovative mobile approach: delivering a seamless, app-like experience without relying on native app stores. This aligns with the permissionless ethos; however, due to Apple’s obscure and restrictive web app distribution rules, the PWA remains effectively hidden from users. It’s a powerful feature held back not by tech, but by lack of visibility and gatekeeping.

“From App to Agent” – The next leap in financial behavior

Robinhood’s rise demonstrated a profound lesson: when you reduce friction and elevate experience, markets expand. The shift from Wall Street terminals to iOS apps was not a marginal upgrade: it was a behavioral revolution. This opportunity exists today for Web3.

But opportunity alone is not destiny. The next wave of crypto adoption will depend not on ideology or protocol purity, but on usability. Interfaces shape behavior, and behavior shapes liquidity. The user is no longer at a desktop – they are in a cab, in line, on a bus. If DeFi doesn’t work in that context, it won’t scale.

The interface is the innovation. And mobile is not just part of the future of finance, it is already the infrastructure through which that future is arriving.

If mobile was the first interface revolution in finance, AI is poised to be the second. The agent economy will likely depend on crypto rails to empower autonomous agents as financial actors, coordinating through smart contracts. That makes it all the more urgent to bridge users onchain today, especially via mobile, before this future fully takes shape.

As AI integrates into trading and investing apps, we can expect more algorithmic tools in the hands of retail investors, enhanced social-investing coordination, and deeper personalization of portfolios and risk preferences. Voice interfaces and augmented reality may blur the line between discovery and execution. The app, as we know it, will evolve into a real-time assistant, coach, strategist & become an automated user guide.