Crypto payments future: Self-custody and mass adoption – The Clear Crypto Podcast | Episode 4

In the next few lines, we’ll summarize the 4th episode of the Clear Crypto Podcast, a deep dive into one of the most pressing challenges facing the blockchain world today. Can crypto finally shed its reputation for being clunky, intimidating, and complicated? Can it deliver the kind of seamless, intuitive user experience we’ve come to expect from the slickest apps on our phones?

For a technology that promises a new era of financial sovereignty and digital ownership, the user experience has often felt stuck in the past. Newcomers are frequently greeted with a barrage of jargon, terrifyingly long hexadecimal addresses, and the constant fear that one wrong click could send their funds into the digital abyss. For a technology to go mainstream, it must feel safe, simple, and empowering.

That critical transformation is finally underway. In this episode, host Nathan Jeffay sits down with Gareth Jenkinson, Managing Editor of Cointelegraph, and a guest uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between traditional finance and the decentralized future: Chad West. As one of the earliest employees at Revolut, the fintech behemoth that redefined how millions manage their money, Chad was instrumental in building a platform synonymous with user-friendliness. Today, he’s applying those same hard-won principles to the world of crypto with Ready (formerly Ready), a next-generation self-custodial crypto wallet built on the powerful Starknet layer 2 network.

This conversation isn’t just about incremental improvements; it’s about a fundamental reimagining of how we interact with our digital assets, making crypto not just powerful, but practical and accessible for everyone.

From Fintech Darling to Crypto Pioneer

To understand where crypto’s user experience is headed, it’s essential to look at the revolution that preceded it in financial technology. Before exploring the innovations at Ready, Nathan asked Chad to reflect on his journey at Revolut, a company that became a household name by solving problems that traditional banks had ignored for decades.

“I was employee number 12 at Revolut,” Chad shared, painting a picture of the company’s humble origins. “I headed up all things growth, marketing, and comms for five years, from a tiny little workspace… to probably the highest valued FinTech company in the world right now.”

Revolut’s initial masterstroke was its travel card, which eliminated predatory foreign exchange (FX) fees. Anyone who had ever traveled or sent money internationally knew the pain: opaque fees, poor exchange rates, and multi-day waiting periods for wire transfers. Revolut replaced that entire frustrating process with a simple card and an elegant app. This masterclass in solving a clear user pain point gave them their initial product-market fit. But the vision was always far grander.

“Revolut’s goal was always to essentially build the WeChat of the West,” Chad explained. “This one app where you could do everything finance, from your banking to crypto, to stocks, to booking flights and accommodation, you name it.” This concept of a financial “super-app” was brought to life through a relentless focus on a simple, intuitive user experience. Revolut took complex operations—like stock trading, commodity investing, or buying cryptocurrency—and distilled them into a single tap.

Interestingly, it was Revolut’s entry into crypto during the 2017 bull run that provided a key lesson. “The numbers were just insane,” Chad recalled. Users flocked to the platform because it offered a trusted, one-tap way to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum, running for the hills when they looked at the complex interfaces of traditional crypto exchanges. “Even though Revolut’s fees were a little bit higher than traditional exchanges, people were happy to pay that 0.5% more for that ease of use, but also for the trust.” This proved a critical point: users will pay for simplicity and a name they trust. It’s this exact philosophy that Chad now brings to his work at Ready.

The Bedrock Principle: Why Self-Custody is Everything

Before diving into how Ready is building a “Revolut for crypto,” it’s crucial to understand a foundational concept that defines true digital ownership: self-custody.

Gareth Jenkinson laid it out perfectly. “The backbone of the cryptocurrency space is really built on the idea of what Bitcoin brought. And a big part of that is actually having ownership of the financial asset that you’re holding,” he explained.

To grasp the difference, consider an analogy. Using a centralized exchange is like keeping your gold in a bank’s vault. It’s convenient, and they handle the security. But you are trusting them. You don’t hold the key to the vault. If the bank mismanages its business, gets robbed, or decides you’re no longer a customer they wish to serve, your access can be cut off. You’re asking for permission to access what you own.

This is the custodial model. The exchange holds your private keys for you. As we saw with the catastrophic collapse of FTX, this trust can be broken. “All it takes is some dodgy business to be going on the back end there. And you’ve lost everything as people did,” Chad stated grimly. The FTX scandal, where billions in user funds vanished overnight due to fraud and mismanagement, was a brutal lesson in the risks of centralization. The phrase “not your keys, not your coins” became a painful reality for millions.

In contrast, self-custody is like having that gold in a high-tech safe in your own home. You hold the key. No one else. This is the model of a self-custodial wallet like Ready. You hold your own private keys, giving you absolute and final control over your funds.

After FTX, many expected a mass exodus to self-custody. While there was a spike, it wasn’t the total industry shift some had predicted. Gareth pointed to the reason: convenience. “I am still quite surprised that a lot of people still just leave a load of crypto on exchanges,” he admitted. “My general opinion is that most people don’t find it convenient enough to hold cryptocurrency in a self-custodial manner. That, for me, is the biggest takeaway.” The anxiety of managing a seed phrase, the complexity of interacting with decentralized applications (dApps), and the fear of making an unrecoverable error were significant barriers. This friction point is precisely what Ready is engineered to eliminate.

Building a Revolut for Crypto: The Ready Mission

Chad’s move from fintech to crypto was driven by a powerful ideology, born from witnessing the fragility of access in the traditional system.

“I saw firsthand in regulated, centralized finance, how just having the wrong opinion or putting the wrong tweet out there could immediately see all of your funds be [frozen],” Chad said. This can happen to political dissidents, activists, or even freelancers in countries with unstable regimes. “That just shocked me. For me, having a bank account is basically like a human right. It’s impossible to function in today’s world without having one.”

This conviction is the driving force behind Ready. The mission is to deliver the promise of self-custody—where your right to transact cannot be taken away—without the scary, user-hostile experience. When you give your crypto to a centralized exchange, you’re placing it in a “black box.” You have no visibility into their risk management or internal security. You just have to trust them.

“No central bank, no regulator, no government can come in and say, ‘Hey, freeze Nathan’s self-custody wallet.’ Even if they wanted to, they physically can’t,” Chad explained. This is the power of a decentralized network. But to bring this power to the mainstream, the experience has to feel as safe and simple as the best fintech apps.

Beyond the Seed Phrase: Innovating on Security and Usability

For over a decade, self-custody was synonymous with the seed phrase: a list of 12 or 24 words you had to write down and protect with your life. Lose it, and your crypto was gone forever. It was a terrifyingly fragile system and a non-starter for mass adoption.

“We don’t really believe that seed phrases are the future,” Chad stated unequivocally. Ready is pioneering a new model built on the advanced capabilities of the Starknet layer 2, specifically a technology called account abstraction.

Account abstraction is a paradigm shift for wallets. In a traditional crypto account, your account is your key. They are fused together. Account abstraction separates them. This means your account (your address on the blockchain) can be controlled by more flexible rules, not just a single, rigid private key. This opens the door to a host of user-friendly features that were previously impossible.

1. Social Recovery with Guardians: This is Ready’s answer to the lost seed phrase problem. Instead of a single point of failure, you can designate “Guardians”—which can be trusted friends, family members, or even other hardware or software wallets you own. If you lose access to your primary device, you can use a majority of your Guardians to securely approve the recovery of your account. It’s a distributed, user-controlled recovery process that provides redundancy and peace of mind. “We’ve innovated in the past with solutions like guardians,” Chad noted, “whereby you can assign an individual or another wallet as a trust keeper of your Ready wallet.”
2. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): We use 2FA everywhere—Gmail, banking, social media. It’s a standard security expectation. If a hacker gets your password, they are stopped by a second check. “Very basic, very standard, didn’t exist in crypto,” Chad said. “We were able to bring that into crypto [on Starknet].” With Ready, you can require a second, off-chain confirmation (like from your email) for high-value transactions. This familiar security layer makes users feel significantly safer.

 

The Power of Layer 2: How Starknet Unlocks a Seamless Experience

 

These sophisticated features are only practical because Ready is built on Starknet, a leading layer 2 scaling solution. Trying to implement these on Ethereum’s main network (Layer 1) would be slow and astronomically expensive due to high transaction fees, often called “gas.”

Think of Ethereum Layer 1 as a congested city highway. Every car (transaction) has to pay a high toll (gas fee), and during rush hour, the traffic is gridlocked and tolls skyrocket. Layer 2s like Starknet are like a hyper-efficient mass transit system. Starknet uses advanced cryptography called ZK-rollups to bundle thousands of transactions together off-chain.

To extend the analogy, a ZK-rollup acts like a giant, super-fast bus. It picks up thousands of passengers (transactions) in a special express lane (off-chain computation), validates all their tickets internally, and then presents a single cryptographic proof—like one master ticket—to the main highway tollbooth (Ethereum L1). This is vastly more efficient, resulting in dramatically lower fees and a faster user experience.

This scalability is what makes account abstraction features feasible, but Starknet’s innovation doesn’t stop there. Chad also highlighted session keys, a feature set to transform interactive applications like gaming.

“If we look at blockchain gaming, the experience was terrible,” he said. “Every time you performed an action like swinging a sword, you would have to approve that transaction and pay a fee.” This stop-start experience destroyed the flow of gameplay. Session keys solve this by allowing a user to approve a “session”—for example, granting a game permission to perform low-stakes actions for one hour—without needing a constant stream of pop-up approvals.

“By building on Starknet and utilizing tech like ZK-rollups, session keys, or account abstraction, we’ve been able to finally build that slick, smart wallet experience that we’re known for,” Chad concluded.

 

Putting It All into Practice: The Crypto Nomad Debit Card

Advanced technology is only useful if it solves real-world problems. Ready’s recently launched self-custodial debit card is the perfect embodiment of their philosophy in action.

“We’ve launched a debit card initially in Europe, and we’ve done it a little bit differently,” Chad said. The card is specifically designed for the crypto nomad. Gareth described this growing demographic as people who “espouse all the virtues of crypto and freedom technology… carrying all their money in a cryptocurrency wallet and living a very borderless lifestyle.”

Imagine a freelance developer getting paid in a stablecoin to their Ready wallet. They can then use their Ready card to buy a coffee in Lisbon, pay for their apartment in Bali, and book a flight to their next destination in Bogotá—all seamlessly, spending directly from their self-custodied funds.

The card’s features are purpose-built for this life:

• 100% Self-Custody: True ownership meets real-world spending.
• Generous Cashback: Up to 10% cashback on purchases.
• No FX Fees: Absolutely critical for a borderless lifestyle.
• Crypto-Native Perks: Valuable discounts on tools nomads already use, from VPNs and security services to travel booking sites.

This card is more than a payment tool; it’s an enabler for a new way of living, powered by self-sovereign finance.

 

The Road Ahead: Abstraction is the Destination

Gareth remains optimistic but clear-eyed about the journey ahead. The wounds from failures like FTX have made the argument for self-custody undeniable, but the ultimate victory depends on vanquishing the final boss: complexity.

“The most important people in the industry are driving that ahead,” he said, “but there’s probably another five or 10 years until we really reach that final destination.”

That final destination is a world of total abstraction. A world where users don’t have to think about which blockchain they’re on. “We need to stop thinking in terms of chains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana,” Gareth mused. A user’s wallet should show a single, unified balance. When they go to pay for something, the wallet’s intelligence should automatically route the payment through the cheapest, fastest path—be it Starknet, another L2, or a different L1—without the user needing to know or care. It should just work.

This is the holy grail: to combine the ironclad security and freedom of self-custody with an experience that is utterly effortless. Thanks to the vision of teams like Ready and the powerful, scalable foundation of layer 2 platforms like Starknet, that future is no longer a distant sci-fi concept. It’s being coded into existence today.