Crypto has built the plumbing, but not the product yet. This was a common theme at the annual Ethereum development conference $ETH Last week in Denver, attendees were looking to shift focus from a continually depressed market to building better Web3 products.
The two people who attracted attention at the event were $ETH Denver founder John Paylor and Aztec Foundation founder Zachary Williamson have given candid assessments of why blockchain has yet to gain mainstream users.
“If you look at what we’ve accomplished in 10 years, we’ve built an incredible amount of technology, architecture, scaffolding and plumbing systems that are driving this revolution,” Parr said. decryption. “But what we’ve actually been really bad at is getting ordinary people to use ordinary things.”
Cryptocurrencies have built the infrastructure, but not the products that people actually want to use
“If you look at what we’ve accomplished in 10 years, we’ve built an incredible amount of technology, architecture, scaffolding, and plumbing systems that are driving this revolution.” $ETH Denver… pic.twitter.com/57IgmxwuQN
— Decrypt (@DecryptMedia) February 20, 2026
Paller said Web3 does not semantically replace everyday digital tools with better, decentralized alternatives. Not for lack of effort, but even Web3 apps, which have gotten a lot of attention, haven’t been able to displace their established, centrally managed rivals.
“This was the original vision for Web3: We are going to decentralize everything,” he said. “Well, we found that making it harder to adjust makes it much harder to adjust.”
This lack of alignment has prevented Web3 from meeting the most basic expectations consumers have of new technology, Paller said.
“The rule of thumb is that when it comes to technology, it’s generally cheaper, better and faster, but blockchain isn’t cheap, it’s not really fast, and it doesn’t have a good user experience,” Paler said. “So we’re basically asking people to trade their absolute human certainty that something is cheaper, better, or faster for what they want in their minds.”
Zac Williamson, co-founder of the Aztec Foundation, a privacy-focused organization that supports Ethereum’s layer 2 blockchain Aztec, made similar criticisms, linking it to the cryptocurrency’s broader reputational issues.
“Cryptocurrency is hated by the general public – hated, with a capital H,” Williamson said. decryption. “People are no longer in this industry because of scammers, because of casino games, and because of the lack of real-world recruitment that improves their lives.”
Beyond the continued stigma against the use of cryptocurrencies in crime, Williamson also pointed out that the industry has yet to produce an app that outperforms Web2 alternatives in terms of user experience.
“The reality is that you need to build better and more engaging applications than the Web2 alternatives that provide a better experience,” Williamson says. “Farcaster does not offer a better experience than Facebook. Web3’s cryptocurrency payments rail provides a terrible user experience compared to Web2, and will not be adopted until these issues are fixed.”
Williamson said the big barrier is technical, as crypto apps require users to understand their wallets and private keys before using them. That’s a barrier for most people.
“You have to know about crypto to use crypto apps, because the UX sucks,” he said. “You need a wallet. You need to put money into that wallet. So you need adoption, and adoption is painful.”
He argued that mainstream adoption will result in invisible cryptographic infrastructure running beneath the applications they are familiar with, rather than users consciously “migrating to Web3.”
“The success story of blockchain is not having a blockchain,” Williamson said. “There are just apps that use blockchain.”
Paller drew parallels to the early Internet, where conferences focused on protocol layers rather than consumer products.
“We don’t talk about it anymore,” he said. “Here we’re talking about which apps you use.”
He added that artificial intelligence could accelerate that change by removing much of the complexity that users currently face.
Both founders saw the current market downturn as a turning point for Web3 builders. Williamson said the industry needs to prioritize products that offer clear value while reducing activities that define cryptocurrencies in the public eye.
“There’s a lot of crap and there’s a lot of good,” he said. “The problem at the moment is that the bullshit has a big hold over the good stuff.”
