Crypto built the plumbing, but the products still aren’t built. This was a common theme at the annual Ethereum development conference $ETH Denver last week, as attendees tried to shift focus from a perpetually declining market to building better Web3 products.
Two prominent voices at the event, $ETH Denver founder John Paller and Aztec Foundation founder Zachary Williamson provided a blunt assessment of why blockchain has yet to win over mainstream users.
“If you look at what we’ve accomplished in ten years, we’ve built an astonishing amount of technology and architecture, scaffolding and plumbing systems that are powering this revolution,” Paller said. Declutter. “But what we’re actually epically bad at is getting ordinary people to use ordinary things.”
Crypto built the infrastructure, but not the products that people actually want to use
“If you look at what we’ve accomplished in ten years, we’ve built an astonishing amount of technology and architecture, scaffolding and plumbing systems that are powering this revolution,” $ETH Denver… pic.twitter.com/57IgmxwuQN
— Decrypt (@DecryptMedia) February 20, 2026
Paller said Web3 has not meaningfully replaced everyday digital tools with better decentralized alternatives. It’s not for lack of trying, but even Web3 apps that have attracted significant attention have failed to displace their established, centralized rivals.
“That was the original vision of Web3: We’re going to decentralize all things,” he said. “Well, it turns out that coordination is very difficult when you make things harder to coordinate.”
Because of this lack of coordination, Web3 has failed to meet the most basic expectations consumers have of new technology, according to Paller.
“The rule of thumb is generally cheaper, better and faster in terms of technology, but blockchains are not cheaper, they are not really faster and the user experience is not better,” Paller said. “So we’re essentially asking people to trade what is absolute human certainty for 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, made a similar criticism, linking it to crypto’s broader reputation problem.
“Crypto is hated – hated, with a capital H – by ordinary people,” said Williamson Declutter. “People aren’t 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.”
Aside from the lingering stigma of using crypto 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 provide a better experience,” said Williamson. “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 resolved, we won’t 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 is a barrier for most people.
“You need to have knowledge of crypto to use a crypto app because the UX sucks,” he said. “You need a wallet. You have to finance that wallet, which means you need a ramp, and ramps are painful.”
He argued that mainstream adoption will not look like users consciously “moving to Web3,” but rather the crypto infrastructure functioning invisibly under known applications.
“The success story of blockchain is that you don’t have a blockchain,” says Williamson. “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 things like that anymore,” he said. “Now we just talk about what apps you use.”
He added that artificial intelligence could accelerate this shift by removing much of the complexity that users currently face.
Both founders viewed the current market downturn as a turning point for Web3 builders. Williamson said the industry should prioritize products that deliver clear value, while reducing the activity that has come to define crypto in the public eye.
“There’s the amount of crap, and then there’s the amount of good stuff,” he said. “Right now the problem is that the crap really dominates the good stuff.”