I Spent 10 Years in Web3. Here’s Why I’m No Longer Hyped — And What Needs to Change

Anthony Estebe- @antho1404

I spent 10 years building in Web3 — and I’m ready to leave.
Not because the tech failed.
Because we did.

As a developer and entrepreneur, I was hooked by this idea of a decentralized infrastructure where money was part of everything.
It felt perfect: you could build a product without worrying about servers, redundancy, or infrastructure, and at the same time, you could monetize however you wanted.

Not with just one-shot payments or subscriptions, but by designing actual economies into your product — pay-per-use models, new monetization mechanics, and business models we’d never seen before.
That was exciting to me. That’s why I jumped in.

The Vision That Pulled Me In

Over the past 10 years, I built two companies in the Web3 space — one bootstrapped, one VC-backed.
I’ve been on both sides: issuing a token, staying away from tokens, navigating hype cycles, and helping businesses of all sizes — from indie builders to top-tier players worth hundreds of millions, sometimes billions.

And almost all of them shared what I now see as the core issue in Web3: tokens.

At first, the promise felt magical.
Create a token (crypto or NFT), give it a hint of utility, stir up some FOMO, and sell it to a wave of underinformed investors.
Meanwhile, try to reverse-engineer a product around that token — at any cost.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Token Trap

As the space matured, tokens became the default fundraising model — ICOs, TGEs, IDOs, you name it.
And with that came a shift: projects stopped thinking long-term.
The goal wasn’t to build something meaningful — it was to grow fast, launch a token, and cash in.

VCs started chasing early-stage discounts for quick flips.
Founders optimized for launches, not retention.
What followed was a predictable loop: pump, dump, disappear.

Worse, it became the standard.
If you weren’t playing the game, you couldn’t raise.
So even promising teams caved — cutting corners, bloating roadmaps, and warping their product just to fit a token narrative.
Welcome tokenomics.

It created a cycle where the average project’s lifespan was just a few months — and where real innovation had no room to breathe.

Normies Never Came

One of the recurring themes in Web3 was always the same:

"How do we bring in the masses?"

A lot of effort went into onboarding "normies" — gamers, casual users, regular people.
But the core problem never changed: most projects were built around the token, not the user.

At Liteflow, we had countless projects come to us with the same question:

"How do I bring more utility to my token?" And almost every time, the real answer was: "Are you sure you need this token?"

But no one wanted to hear that.

Because the truth is, most people don’t care about compounding yields, governance mechanics, or staking strategies.
They don’t want to think like investors just to play a game or use a product.

And wallets? Wallets are a mess.
There are dozens of them — if not hundreds — and each app needs to support too many just to avoid backlash from "Web3 users".
The result is a fragmented, fragile, painful onboarding flow that’s nearly impossible to explain to someone outside the space.

And once you finally manage to create a wallet, you hit the final boss of bad UX:

"Buy my token to unlock this feature."

Web3 adoption didn’t fail because of tech — it failed because it chased tokens over users.

Blockchain Found Its Niche — and It’s Not You

For years, I believed blockchain could power more than just money.
That we could run entire apps on-chain — messaging, documents, media, productivity tools — and enable fairer, pay-per-use models with native monetization built in.

I imagined:

But none of that ever happened.

The dream was clear.
The execution never came.
Because the reality is: blockchain is great for one thing — money.

And that’s okay.
But let’s stop pretending it’s something it’s not.

What’s My Hope

I don’t think blockchain needs to change.
It found its place — and that place is money.
That’s fine.

What I do hope is that builders stop lying to themselves — and to their users.

  1. If you’re building a good product, then build a good product.
  2. Web3 or not.
  3. If crypto fits, use it. But maybe start with stablecoins — something people can actually understand and use.
  4. If you really want to launch a token, go ahead.
  5. Just be honest: it’s about raising money, not delivering value.

At least meme coins are honest.
No pitch deck. No utility.
Just: "We’re here to speculate."
Ironically, that’s more transparent than most token projects I’ve seen.

That’s not what drives me anymore.

What drives me is helping founders and startups build real things — with actual value for real users.
And after 10 years in Web3, I’ve realized that means stepping out of the hype — and getting back to work.