Web3 Is Building Financial Freedom Only for People Who Can Afford Mistakes

In brief

• Permissionless access shows only that someone can enter the financial system, she argues, while inclusion depends on whether they can use it safely.
• Every user has an "error budget": a $25 fee is an annoyance on a $10,000 transfer and a quarter of a $100 one.
• Sub-Saharan Africa recorded $205.7 billion in on-chain value in the year to June 2025, according to Chainalysis, with $92.1 billion of it in Nigeria.

Web3 presents itself as a more inclusive financial system, open to anyone with a smartphone and internet access. And that's significant progress for sure, but just because we have access doesn't imply it's truly safe or practical to utilize.

A user can still lose funds by selecting the wrong network, overpaying on fees or delivering assets to an unsupported destination. When the same errors are repeated regularly, however, they're also a sign of a product problem, even if the industry calls this client error.

Open access is not financial inclusion

Permissionless access answers a relatively narrow question—can a person enter the system? Financial inclusion requires us to ask several more difficult ones. Can that person understand what they are doing, recognize a dangerous action before confirming it and use the product without first losing enough money to learn how it works?