UX improvement ideas related to Mina

Community
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Recent success of other L1 chains, eg Solana, Avalanche, Cosmos and Near, have all been associated with good UX experiences (eg I’ve heard a lot of positive comments about Phantom wallet on Solana and Keplr wallet on Cosmos). I understand that Mina is still in its early days, but it would be good to get some community feedback on what frictions they encounter when using Mina, so that the teams would have a better idea of where to look at for improvements. This thread is for that purpose, and calls for all users to give their own feedback.
I’ll start with mine as both an end user and a block producer. I should also say that I am aware of the decision making behind some of these (eg why there is a wallet creation fee), but below I’m only describing from UX pov:

[A]. end user:

  1. finality too slow - deposit to exchanges take 1 hr, among the slowest chain I’ve used;
  2. wallet creation fee 1MINA - not many other chains do that;
  3. delegation process a bit confusing on wallets, showing 0MINA - setting the miner fees as the whole balance could stil happen;

[B]. block producer

  1. stablility of the mina client still not ideal - frequent restarts and could miss blocks due to networking inefficiencies. Can see the improvements with each release but still some way to go;
  2. unstable uptime tracking process, and easy to cheat. - there are improvement suggestions in place and the Mina Foundation is reviewing them.
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Adding to end users:

  • Having to rely on Validators to get rewards
  • Unclear staking rewards calculation / Unclear timings when (re)delegating / Unclear how to add or withdraw Minas and how everything is being calculated overall / No common simple-to-use Dashboard
  • A lot of variance between epochs even for big pools (which also makes small pool very unattractive, which favors centralization…)
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Just a quick comment about the " 1. wallet creation fee 1MINA - not many other chains do that"
There are a few chains that do that but they do it in a different manner.
For instance, Polkadot requires a minimum of 1 DOT in order to “keep the account active”. If you have a balance of less than 1 DOT, your wallet is actually removed from the Ledger.

I would’ve actually preferred this over the burning of 1 Mina to the accounts because you can reclaim that 1 Mina with the Polkadot method.

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Another particular issue that I have is that Mina doesn’t seem to utilize all available slots in the epoch. Which leads to issues with the finality, etc. However, if the VRF were to change to where people can potentially win more slots (and thus more blocks), there would be more issues with forking and thus negatively impact the uptime tracker.

Of course, people would definitely complain about it but I believe it should help with the TPS.

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Agreed. The theoretical 0.75 slot fill rate is a security measure, but due to networking issues, it drops to far below that (today there were periods of ~1hr with no block).