The Infrastructure Is There, But Where Are the Users?
At ETH Denver last week, a sobering reality check emerged from the conversations. John Paller, the conference founder, put it bluntly: “When you look at what we’ve accomplished in 10 years, we have built an amazing amount of technology and architecture and scaffolding and plumbing systems that power this revolution. But what we’ve actually been epically bad at is getting regular people to use regular things.”
I think that’s a pretty honest assessment, actually. We’ve spent years building the pipes and wires, but forgot to build the faucets people actually want to turn on. The original Web3 vision was about decentralizing everything, but as Paller noted, “it turns out that coordinating is very difficult when you make things more difficult to coordinate.”
The User Experience Problem
Zac Williamson from the Aztec Foundation offered a similar, perhaps even harsher, critique. “Crypto is hated—hated, capital H—by regular people,” he told Decrypt. That’s strong language, but maybe it’s what we need to hear.
The issue, according to both builders, comes down to basic expectations. Paller mentioned the “cheaper, better, faster” rule that usually applies to new technology. Blockchains, he pointed out, aren’t really cheaper, they’re not faster, and the user experience definitely isn’t better. So we’re asking people to trade certainty for an ethos, and that’s a tough sell.
Williamson was particularly critical of the current state of Web3 applications. “Farcaster doesn’t really offer a better experience than Facebook. Web3 crypto payment rails offer a terrible user experience compared to Web2.” He’s got a point there—when was the last time you heard someone say, “I love how easy it is to use this crypto app”?
The Technical Barrier
One major hurdle Williamson identified is the technical knowledge required. “You have to know about crypto to use a crypto app, because the UX sucks,” he said. “You need a wallet. You need to fund that wallet, which means you need an on-ramp, and on-ramps are painful.”
That’s the reality for most people. They don’t want to learn about private keys or seed phrases just to try an app. They want something that works, something familiar. Williamson suggested that true mainstream adoption won’t look like users consciously “moving to Web3,” but rather blockchain infrastructure operating invisibly beneath applications people already use.
“The success case for blockchain is you don’t have blockchain,” he argued. “You just have apps that use the blockchain.”
Looking Forward
Paller drew an interesting parallel to the early internet days, when conferences focused on protocol layers rather than consumer products. “We don’t talk about that stuff anymore,” he said. “Now we just talk about which apps you’re using.”
Both founders seemed to view the current market conditions as a potential turning point. With less speculative frenzy, maybe builders can focus on creating products that actually deliver value. Williamson framed it in terms of volume: “There’s the volume of bullshit, and then there’s the volume of good things. Right now, the problem is that the bullshit massively dominates the good things.”
Perhaps the most interesting suggestion came from Paller, who mentioned artificial intelligence could help remove some of the current complexity. That might be worth exploring—using AI to smooth out the rough edges that currently make Web3 apps so difficult for regular people to use.
What strikes me about these comments is their honesty. After years of hype and promises, some of the people building this technology are admitting they haven’t yet delivered on the original vision. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—it might be the first step toward actually building something people want to use.
