When I joined web3 full-time in early 2022, it was exciting to use wallets for the first time and get familiar with the community.

But then, it stopped being fun when I needed like 2 to 3 wallets to keep up.

This didn’t stop, the prominence of layer 2 rollups made the entire experience worse.

It was sad seeing a community that has once thrived on collaborations, acceptance and innovation of a decentralized web now operate in divided arms and silos, each team fighting for a market share of the same thousands of users.

I used to think we were just one massive community still finding our feet in the new world we created. And I have watched average users who expect to see the ecosystem the same way I do, get so confused as well.

The reality is crypto has gotten so overwhelming. It is now a complex network state that has too many moving parts - with none proven to retain external folks except the ones built on financial rails.

Now an average person who gets onboarded onchain, has no idea what to do but to buy cryptocurrencies, flip it and maybe get rekt over and over again.

And when they finally find a use case other than money, the incentive to use isn’t convincing enough to make them ditch web 2.0 apps for web 3.0 alternatives.

The Dangers

With ETFs and big tech giants now looking to integrate stablecoins, large corporations can easily take advantage of that and we could start seeing more of web2-patched onchain experiences.

This is bad because users learn to stay on existing rails without realizing the essence of digital freedom and ownership.

Ownership will become abstracted into faster transactions and cross-border payments. People will fail to care about verification of transactions, security of assets and even privacy protection.

How can we prevent this?

In recent years, we have addressed blockchain tech as a distributed and verifiable commercial system.

That is entirely different from the pure narrative of the decentralized web as a huge commitment system that benefits humanity - an aftermath effect of bitcoin’s success.

And it is true, the former has a better taste and a clearer direction but we should have let go of it a long time ago.

As an industry, we should always optimize for better taste and a clearer direction as we continue to learn from consumer behavior.

And now, people need to understand that we have moved past web3 as money, that we are now onto usage and it is priced - cheaper, but priced! They need to understand and take comfort in spending to use.

One could argue that we should optimize for more gasless experiences because people are used to pay-to-use in commercial and financial rails but aren’t used to it on computational usage. But we can see the case with Artificial Intelligence and the narrative that drove its adoption.

The latter enhances productivity while the former gives freedom and ownership.

With Artificial Intelligence, we can see that people are ready to accept priced productivity but are they ready to accept priced freedom and ownership?

No one can really tell because the crypto industry has failed to effectively sell this narrative and has instead focused more on the financial opportunities it can provide.

How we can drive adoption

Adoption and retention of users will have to be unlocked individually. This is a paradigm shift to what we have always been used to.

Tell a new person to interact with Zora or Warpcast and watch them ask about why they need to pay to use. The only attractive upside you can preach to them is that they get paid too when others mint - then we go through this cycle of back and forth explanations on who pays who, how the economics work, how it’s going to benefit a random person and not just a celebrity and we see that we all end up at the same intersection of doubt and a little optimism.

This just shows you how tough it’s going to be. Not everyone has settled with the fact that they can be creators. We have to accept that and grow into a space where we can provide the right experience for different people in a way that will offer them incentives (which is not always about money) better than the existing internet to make them stay.

But here’s my final verdict:

Cryptocurrencies already found a vehicle which is the payment problem they solve. The decentralized web needs a vehicle for web3.0 to become simple.

We should spend more of our time finding that vehicle.

Making crypto simple is what every consumer-facing team should strive towards. Find that vehicle and make it work.

We should be onboarding the rest of the world to digital freedom.