Unlocking mass adoption with Global Accounts

DIMO's 10x UX improvement to expand beyond early adopters to all car owners

Mar 30, 2025

Nobody is using crypto because of its user experience. Over the better part of a decade, crypto has grown from a toy internet money used to buy fake-ids and pizzas to a prolific ecosystem of economic value — ranging from permissionless financial infrastructure to open social graphs to connected vehicle networks. As of writing, the total crypto market cap sits at $2.8T, with over half a billion unique crypto users.1 This growth has happened in spite of, not because of, crypto’s clunky user experience.

Crypto has found product market fit as a store of value, with Bitcoin now worth roughly 14% of gold’s total market value.2 It has found product market fit as a financial system that doesn’t close on the weekend. Protocols like Uniswap and Compound have paved the way, and legacy fintech and finance businesses are now joining in. Stablecoins alone saw $27.6T in transfer volume in 2024 — 7.7% more than Visa and Mastercard combined.3

I believe crypto will find product market fit as open infrastructure beyond finance, like an open social graph, distributed infrastructure systems, and an open connected vehicle ecosystem. But to get there, the benefits of these distributed systems must be coupled with amazing user experience. While early adopters will tolerate clunky UX, the mass market demands better.

While the call for better UX has been echoed across conference podiums for years now, I believe that 2025 is the year we have an opportunity as an industry to make this happen. It’s the year people will use crypto because of the UX, not in spite of it. At DIMO, we just launched Global Accounts in order to make this vision a reality for the auto-industry.

The why

Getting onchain is anything but easy. The typical onboarding experience includes:

Downloading a wallet app
Creating a wallet, and writing down your seed phrase in a secure location (don’t lose it, and don’t get phished!)
Creating a Coinbase account
Depositing funds to your Coinbase account
Buying some tokens on Coinbase
Sending those tokens to your new wallet (make sure it’s on the right chain, and to send tokens for gas!)
If you’ve made it this far, congrats. You can now log in to an app.

At DIMO, we saw this as a huge bottleneck. That 10 minute onboarding process simply isn’t viable — not for everyday drivers, and not for auto-industry enterprises. So we set out to find a better solution.

The what

Embedded wallets are a popular solution which do address many of the UX friction points above. But, they are confined to the scope of a single application, and thus negate a key crypto value prop: interoperability. The value of the DIMO network comes from car owners being able to bring their cars with them to any auto-industry application; not just the DIMO mobile app. Our solution needed to take the best aspects of embedded wallets and EOA wallets, and couple them together. Stupid simple sign-in and authentication alongside interoperability, self-custody, oh, and, security.

That’s exactly what we built. Using a combination of ZeroDev’s Kernel Smart Contract Accounts and Turnkey’s secure key management and authentication solutions, we built our Global Accounts so that they are:

Intuitive: accounts are created and authenticated using passkeys and email.
Frictionless: with gas sponsorship and passkey signing, users can take onchain actions with just the click of a button and a Face ID.
Self-custodied: only the user has permissions to sign transactions, using either passkeys or email authentication.
Interoperable: any DIMO user can log in to any application in the DIMO ecosystem, taking their vehicles with them with just a few clicks.

Enrolling in Roil’s automated EV incentive program with a DIMO Global Account.

The results

We had strong conviction that this UX would catalyze growth for DIMO by expanding our TAM from crypto-native car owners to all car owners. Still, the results blew us away. Our onboarding time dropped from 10 minutes down to 90 seconds. Sign-in time dropped from 2 minutes to 11 seconds. And, we’ve grown from 110k connected vehicles to 173k since launching Global Accounts last November. This is the 10x UX improvement that the crypto space needs to cross the chasm of mainstream adoption.

In addition to the improved UX for users, Global Accounts makes building on the DIMO platform easier than. With just a few lines of code, developers can let users connect their cars — regardless of vehicle make — in seconds. We now have over 200 developer licenses created, with builders actively creating real-world value for drivers. Roil, for example, has helped over 5,000 EV drivers earn $200/year by automatically redeeming EV incentives based on historical charging data. DLP Labs is enabling over 7,000 car owners to monetize their vehicle data. As more and more auto-industry enterprises integrate with DIMO, car owners will gain access to an increasingly valuable connected vehicle ecosystem.

With momentum building across both users and developers, we’re excited to double down on expanding the connected vehicle app ecosystem and delivering a truly amazing experience for car owners.

If you’re a car owner looking to plug into DIMO’s growing connected vehicle ecosystem, get started by connecting your car in the DIMO mobile app today!

If you’re interested in building in the connected vehicle ecosystem, check out our docs here or reach out to me at henry@dimo.co.

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