The year is 2025. It is more than 16 years since Bitcoin WhitePaper was published and 10 years since the launch of Ethereum, and the programmable smart contract layer that came with it. With billions of dollars invested in the industry and tens of thousands of developers contributing thousands of applications, primitives and protocols would certainly be ample turnkey web3 tool sets available to extend the adoption?

Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding “No.”

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Still, crucial tool sets that made the technology easy and entertaining to use quickly into the early days of the Internet. It is difficult to determine the exact year when the Internet was big enough to start influencing people’s lives, but I would suggest that it happened sometime in the late 1990s. In 1995, AOL had crossed 3 million user brands and Yahoo! was just launched as a secondary standard port for the Internet. Google was founded three years later and Basic Search became a feature that opened the door to new users around 1999.

The web2 era, which started in the early 2000s, was dominated by user-friendly, template-waisted tools to bring a broad user base to this revolution. Within a year, Amazon Marketplace (2000) brought a turnkey e-commerce solution to the market. Less than five years after Google wrote its first code line, WordPress (2003), MySpace (2003) and Facebook (2004) already allow people to share their own personal profiles and stories online.

Was it the wild success on the Internet that encouraged more companies to quickly offer user -friendly, less technical tools to expand the reach of the industry? Or was it the existence of the better user experiences that allowed the industry to hover? Probably a bit of both.

Nevertheless, we are here in 2025, and the number of web3 platforms similar to those who helped drive the Internet’s rise are very few. The majority of projects or protocols that live are explicitly targeted at either developers or other hardcore crypto nests. Can an industry that continuously suggest that it will aggressively expand the range, do it without actually building tools for a wider user base?

We need to understand the incentives. Web3 participants are often incentive through tokens to get involved early in a given project, no matter how useful it is. Priority is often given to projects with robust social media follow -ups that may respond well to a token launch. But unless the early version of the product connects a critical hole, users are rarely incentives to continue working with it over long periods.

In fact, it’s actually worse than that. Many crypto-native participants are often encouraged Switching to whatever early stage operation is in vogue. In other words, ease of use and long -term adoption is not crucial to “success” in web3, so it is not surprising that they are often overlooked.

In order for web3 to surpass the past is perennial “early” and instead parallel the explosive growth of web2, we need to focus our attention on tools and UI/UXs that expand both our user base and our underlying use cases. To keep attention to the long term, web3 products even need to solve common, genuine problems for users and continue to add value in the long run.