We Gave 5 Crypto Wallets to Someone Who Had Never Used Crypto
Crypto has made wallets dramatically easier to create. It has not made them dramatically easier to understand.
We gave five desktop wallet extensions to a colleague who had never used a crypto product: MetaMask, Phantom, Zerion, Trust Wallet, and Rabby.
She already uses Wise to send and receive money. That is her use case. So for each wallet we asked one closing question: would she move $500 through this instead of Wise if the fees were lower?
She installed all five, created five accounts, and navigated most of them without help. She said no for all five. Zerion, the wallet she scored highest, got the same answer as the rest.
You are measuring activation as wallet creation. Your user is measuring it as confidence.
How we tested
Same task list in each wallet: install the extension, create a wallet, find the receiving address, locate the buy, swap, and network controls, find transaction history, find support.
Each wallet scored 1 to 5 on five dimensions:
- Getting started
- Plain English
- Finding things unaided
- Feeling safe
- Would recommend to another beginner
This covers first impressions only. She did not add money to any wallet or send a transaction.
The scores
| Wallet | Getting started | Plain English | Finding things | Feeling safe | Would recommend | Average |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| MetaMask | 4 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 | **3.6** |
| Phantom | 5 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 4 | **4.4** |
| Zerion | 5 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 5 | **4.6** |
| Trust Wallet | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | **3.0** |
| Rabby | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 4 | **3.4** |Zerion averaged 4.6, Phantom 4.4, MetaMask 3.6, Rabby 3.4, Trust Wallet 3.0.
Feeling safe was the lowest score for every wallet, including the two at the top.
- MetaMask reads clean but leans on vocabulary a beginner doesn't have.
- Phantom ran the smoothest onboarding of the five.
- Zerion scored highest, on one pattern covered below.
- Trust Wallet produced the hardest session. The address, the buy flow, and the network switch each took multiple attempts to find.
- Rabby is fast and minimal, and a single label cost it the buy task.
Setup and trust are separate design problems. These five products are considerably further along on the first.
Finding 1: none of the five replaced Wise
Her reasoning was identical every time: not until she understood what actually happens to the money.
Wise is the tool she already uses for this exact job. None of the five gave her a reason to switch, even at a lower fee. Perfect onboarding scores did not change that.
Your wallet can be effortless to set up and still not displace the tool your user already trusts with her money.
Finding 2: custody wasn't the first fear
MetaMask’s sign-up screen with “Continue with Google” option highlighted.
You probably assume the beginner fear is key loss. It did not appear once in her answers.
Her stated fear, in every review, was billing. Signing into MetaMask through Google, she worried the account was now attached to Google Pay and that testing features would charge her card. In each subsequent wallet she braced for a hidden fee that never came.
Recovery phrases appear nowhere in her answers about feeling unsafe. The five wallets handled them four different ways:
- MetaMask and Phantom created the wallet behind a Google sign-in and never showed her one.
- Zerion made writing the phrase down a required step.
- Trust Wallet created the wallet first, then ran a yellow banner across the home screen: "Backup your Secret Phrase now."
- Rabby ended setup with Open Wallet as the filled primary button and Backup Seed Phrase outlined beneath it. She took the primary.
She didn't fear custody because she didn't yet know enough to fear it. The fear she brought from the rest of the internet was billing: cards on file, trial traps, surprise subscriptions.
One sentence at signup saying that creating a wallet is free and no payment method is attached would have answered the fear she actually walked in with. None of the five said it.
Finding 3: there is no demo mode
MetaMask’s buy screen with the payment method option highlighted.
She expected Buy and Swap to have a trial mode, "just like other sites that have a free trial."
On MetaMask's Buy page she entered $1,500. The page showed Polygon Ecosystem Token as the asset and Debit or Credit as the payment method, with the card logos beneath it. She read it as a checkout and stopped. In her words: "What I expected was a guide on how to buy and swap."
Her mental model came from consumer products that let you preview the core experience before committing. Wallets invert this. Your new user lands in an empty shell where every meaningful action requires funding first.
The empty state is your entire product until money arrives. Three of the five put an instruction in it, and all three said the same thing:
- MetaMask: "Fund your wallet. Get your wallet ready to use web3."
- Zerion: "Get Started by adding crypto to your wallet."
- Phantom: "Add Solana (SOL) to your wallet to get started."
No session showed a sample portfolio, a simulated swap, or a guided testnet path.
The empty state is the cheapest place you have to build trust, and the three that used it used it to ask for money.
Finding 4: vocabulary is navigation
Rabby Wallet home screen with “Bridge” option highlighted.
When a label failed, her method was brute force: "guessing every button and clicking everything."
The words that failed, exactly as they appeared on screen:
- DeFi and NFTs (MetaMask): unknown terms, sections skipped.
- Stats (Zerion): purpose unclear.
- Fund (Trust Wallet): one button hiding Buy crypto, Buy P2P, Deposit from exchange, and Receive from another wallet.
- Bridge (Rabby): read as maybe-buy and never resolved, because Rabby's home screen has no Buy at all.
One unfamiliar term survived. She saw MetaMask's Activity, inferred it meant history, and moved on. A term she could infer was workable. A term she could not infer stopped her.
One word came from the screenshots rather than from her. She never mentioned Perps because she never clicked it. It sits on the home screen of four of the five wallets. Perpetual futures are one tap away in a wallet holding $0.00, while Buy is missing from one product and buried in another.
Every label in your interface is load-bearing navigation. A word she doesn't know sends her clicking through all of it.
Finding 5: networks are the wall every wallet builds differently
Phantom’s network selector showing multiple blockchain networks.
Network controls generated friction in four of five sessions, and no two wallets put them in the same place:
- MetaMask: on the main screen, labeled, found instantly.
- Phantom: behind the profile picture, then Settings, then Active Networks.
- Trust Wallet: an unlabeled globe icon in the top right that turns into the selected chain's logo once switched. Found last, after she had tried everything else.
- Rabby: inside Settings, found by guessing.
Placement is the smaller problem. What the controls contain is the larger one.
Phantom's address menu lists nine addresses under a single Account 1: Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin again with a different address, Robinhood Chain, Base, Sui, Polygon, HyperEVM. The same 0xd1ed... string repeats on five rows. Her description: it's where "you can choose which address wallet you want."
Nine addresses read to her as nine wallets, and nothing on the screen said otherwise.
Trust Wallet asked the same question in the receive flow. To get her own address she went Fund, then Receive from another wallet, then a list of 109 assets in which ETH appears five times on the first screen: Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Zksync, Optimism. No QR code waited at the end of it.
Nothing on any screen explained what a network is or why anyone would switch one. You are handing your user infrastructure topology as a UI control, with no mental model attached.
What actually worked
Her first impression of Zerion was lukewarm. She called the homepage plain and said she wasn't convinced. It finished 5 out of 5 on recommendation, on the strength of one pattern: instructions on every page.
Each onboarding step stated what to do next in plain terms. Every function paired an icon with a label. Core actions sat on the first screen.
Zerion is not a jargon-free product. Its welcome screen reads "A wallet for self-custodial humans. All your crypto & NFTs. 10+ chains." The instructions carried her past the vocabulary. Contextual guidance did more for her than word choice did.
Trust Wallet shows the inverse. Its transaction history showed an unlabeled spinner on an empty account, and she read the product as broken. Wallets that stated the account was empty read as working.
Here are the key takeaways:
- Contextual instruction on every page
- Icon plus label, never icon alone
- Core actions on the first screen
- Empty states that say they're empty
- A plain statement at signup that creating a wallet costs nothing
Wallet UX has come a long way. Installation is fast, social login removed most of the signup burden, and interfaces are cleaner than they have ever been. The getting-started scores reflect that work honestly.
Easier to start is not easier to understand. Our tester could create a wallet, navigate most of them, and recommend one. She could not build enough confidence to move $500 through any of them instead of Wise, even at a lower fee.
The industry spent years removing steps from setup. The uncertainty that stopped our tester is still there.
Originally published on the Uniblock blog: