It has been almost a decade since the launch of the first cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin. It is advent that blockchains has revolutionized the world, and created an altogether different and unique stream for investments. The success story of Bitcoin is a piece of history now, and there are several others who followed its footsteps and are now established players in the market.
Sadly, there are people who don’t know about cryptocurrencies even today, and they form a vast majority of the world. A few weeks ago, a survey conducted in Europe revealed that over 70% of the European population knows almost nothing about cryptocurrencies or blockchain in general, though some of them had heard about Bitcoin.
However, the data recently collected about the confidence of existing users in cryptocurrency transactions doesn’t seem to be encouraging either. People who are aware of cryptocurrencies are quite skeptical towards it, as they feel that digital currencies are quite complex to understand and that they might fail if they get into it. Foundation of Interwallet Operability (FIO) recently revealed the results of a survey conducted on over 200 cryptocurrency users in the last year. These results are quite disappointing, at the best. As per the survey, 75% of general cryptocurrency users fear that the cryptocurrency transactions might fail while spending the tokens online.
The main reason for this fear of failure is that the users feel cryptocurrencies are quite complex, inconvenient to use and vulnerable to hacks. If the cryptocurrency space has to widen its adoption, companies will have to come up with improvements and developments in digital tokens, which would make them more user-friendly more secure and less time-consuming.
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Blockchain Technology came into being with a vision to create a platform which would create a secure and hassle-free asset, unlike traditional options. Initially, blockchain seemed to have accomplished its vision, at least in terms of security. However, hackers got growing the skills and were able to find innovative ways to attack digital assets, which resulted in several cybersecurity breaches reported in the last few years.
The survey report also stated that 55% of the people who carried at least one transaction in the past year encountered at least one problem or technical shortfall which resulted in transaction failures. 13% of the people received incorrect crypto amount either while sending or receiving tokens.
Complexity continued to be a major nagging factor which, kind of irritated the users. About 24% of crypto users were questioned whether the address they’ve mentioned was wrong or manipulated, while 35% were questioned whether the address they provided was accurate. But the most worrying statistic was of the 6% of users, who became victim to phishing or man-in-the-middle crypto attack.
The survey by FIO strongly emphasizes that the crypto space needs a complete revamp in terms of security and ease of usability if it had to attract more users to the platform.
Several reports have been emerging on the internet in the last few months, about cyber attacks by hackers on individual and organizational levels. Many crypto exchanges reported such attacks, causing loss of millions and millions of dollars. Apart from this, the lack of regulations has also resulted in crypto exchanges during the users and taking away millions of dollars. The latest example of this kind is the QuadrigaCX Exchange Scandal, which took away $190 million from over 110,000 users on the exchange based in Canada.
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Therefore, it is quite necessary that besides technical upgradation for security and convenience, the crypto space also requires governments to step in and form strong regulations. Agencies must realize that cryptocurrencies, though as valuable as most other assets, are quite different from the traditional ones. They require a separate framework to ensure customer protection from fraudulent activities.
