Getting Into Cryptocurrency Through Coinbase

So in order to participate in this sort of decentralized economy, what's the gating factor? So I own some crypto, not much because I don't truly understand it. And it was surprisingly easy for me to do that through Coinbase. But my sense is this is still not something that most people can participate in. Well, soCoinbase does make it quite easy to buy and sell cryptocurrencies but when you do that, you're doing it on a centralized platform.