Cryptocurrency likes to describe itself as a tool for financial freedom, open to anyone with an internet connection and no permission required. But according to Pauline Shangett, chief marketing officer at instant-exchange platform ChangeNOW, that framing conflates two very different things: letting someone into the system, and actually making the system usable for them.
“Permissionless access answers a relatively narrow question — can a person enter the system?” Shangett writes in a recent op-ed. Genuine inclusion, she argues, demands something harder: that users understand what a transaction does, recognize which actions are dangerous, and use crypto products without absorbing costly, avoidable mistakes along the way.
An error budget that punishes the smallest accounts
Central to Shangett’s argument is what she calls an “error budget” — the amount of loss a given transaction can absorb before a mistake becomes financially painful. A $25 fee is a rounding error against a $10,000 transfer, she notes, but it wipes out a quarter of a $100 transaction. Protocols and interfaces rarely account for that asymmetry, meaning the same flat fee or the same confusing confirmation screen does far more damage to a user with less capital to begin with — typically the same users crypto’s inclusion narrative claims to be serving.
That imbalance shows up starkly in the regions where crypto adoption is growing fastest. Sub-Saharan Africa processed $205.7 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 51.7% jump year over year, with Nigeria alone accounting for $92.1 billion of that total — activity driven less by speculation than by currency devaluation, high inflation, and remittance channels that are simply too expensive to use otherwise.
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Self-custody shifts the workload, not just the risk
Shangett’s piece also takes aim at how self-custody is marketed. Holding your own keys hands users financial freedom, but it also transfers a set of technical responsibilities — securing a seed phrase, verifying contract permissions, spotting a malicious approval request — that banks normally distribute across entire compliance and fraud teams. Expecting an individual user to shoulder that same workload alone, she argues, is an unrealistic bar the industry has largely declined to reckon with.
What better design would look like
Rather than abandoning self-custody or permissionless access, Shangett calls for products that meet users partway: interfaces that flag incompatible networks before a transfer is sent, explain exactly what a permission grants before it’s approved, simulate a transaction’s outcome ahead of signing, and surface fees that are disproportionate to the size of the transaction — all without taking control away from the user. The goal, as she frames it, isn’t less freedom, but freedom that doesn’t require an expensive mistake to learn how to use.
