In brief
- ETH Denver founder John Paller says Web3 has been “epically bad” at building usable consumer products.
- Aztec Network Zac Williamson argues crypto must beat Web2 on experience, not ideology.
- Both say adoption will stall unless blockchain becomes invisible to users.
Crypto built the plumbing, but it still hasn’t built the products. This was a common theme at the annual Ethereum development conference ETH Denver last week, as attendees attempted to shift the focus away from a continually down market and to building better Web3 products.
Two prominent voices at the event, ETH Denver founder John Paller and Aztec Foundation founder Zachary Williamson, delivered a blunt assessment of why blockchain has yet to win over mainstream users.
“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,” Paller told Decrypt. “But what we’ve actually been epically bad at is getting regular people to use regular things.”
Paller said Web3 has not meaningfully replaced everyday digital tools with better decentralized alternatives. It’s not for a lack of trying, but even Web3 apps that have drawn substantial attention have failed to supplant their established, centralized rivals.
“That was the original vision of Web3—we’re going to decentralize all the things,” he said. “Well, it turns out that coordinating is very difficult when you make things more difficult to coordinate.”
Because of this lack of coordination, Paller said Web3 has failed to meet the most basic expectations consumers have for new technology.
“The rule of thumb is typically cheaper, better, faster in terms of technology, but blockchains are not cheaper, they’re not really faster, and the user experience is not better,” Paller said. “So we’re basically asking people to trade off what is absolute human certainty of cheaper, better, or faster in terms of what they want for an ethos.”
Zac Williamson, co-founder of the Aztec Foundation, a privacy-focused organization that supports the Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Aztec, offered a similar critique and tied it to crypto’s broader reputation problem.
“Crypto is hated—hated, capital H—by regular people,” Williamson told Decrypt. “People are not in this industry because of the scammers, because of the casino games, and because of the lack of real-world adoption that improves their lives.”
Beyond the continued stigma of crypto’s use in crime, Williamson also pointed out that the industry has yet to produce apps that outperform Web2 alternatives in terms of user experience.
“We need to actually build compelling applications that are better than the Web2 alternatives that offer a better experience,” Williamson said. “Farcaster doesn’t really offer a better experience than Facebook. Web3 crypto payment rails offer a terrible user experience compared to Web2. And until these issues are fixed, we’re not going to see adoption.”
Williamson said a major barrier is technical, with crypto apps requiring users to understand wallets and private keys before they can use them. That’s a barrier for most people.
“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.”
He argued that mainstream adoption will not look like users consciously “moving to Web3,” but rather crypto infrastructure operating invisibly beneath familiar applications.
“The success case for blockchain is you don’t have blockchain,” Williamson said. “You just have apps that use the blockchain.”
Paller drew a parallel to the early internet, 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.”
He added that artificial intelligence could speed up that shift by removing much of the complexity users currently face.
Both founders framed the current market downturn as a turning point for Web3 builders. Williamson said the industry must prioritize products that deliver clear value, while reducing the activity that has come to define crypto in the public eye.
“There’s the volume of bullshit, and then there’s the volume of good things,” he said. “Right now, the problem is that the bullshit massively dominates the good things.”
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