The concept of "dogfooding", or "eating your own dog food", is often considered as one of the most fundamental principles of software development and most software-based businesses.

At first glance, it is fairly intuitive why this makes sense. If whoever building a software product is not actively using the very product they are building, how would they know whether there are any problems with it? They would never truly understand what exactly users are complaining about; not notice serious bugs until there are multiple customer complaints; and not really care even if the product is difficult to use user experience-wise.

Bill Gates' experience with installing Movie Maker on Windows XP is a great demonstration of why dogfooding is important:

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package. The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)

If whoever building software don't actually get a chance to use it as a customer, they would never see what is wrong with the software they are building – even for a company as large and structured as Microsoft.

Crypto and Web3 seems to be a notable exception: core developers rarely use the blockchain they are working on. This was a recurring pattern for most core blockchain engineers I have recently met, both online and in person. Interestingly, this also depended on which component of the crypto stack they are working on: for one, developers building smart contracts and DApps (including appchains) were almost always using the app they are building. However, core blockchain developers – working on cryptography, consensus, and client components – have often never used a Web3 wallet, sent tokens onchain, or even swapped tokens on Uniswap in years.

The fact that even developers working on large-scale blockchain projects don't use the product they are working on on a daily basis is only an indicator to some of the most fundamental problems the blockchain/Web3 industry is facing at large. As I talked with more people on this problem, the conclusion became increasingly clear for me – the blockchain industry will be split into four separate industries:

  • Heavily regulated fintech with some of the advantages that comes with onchain remittance; international settlements (including non-fungible assets); and corporate governance
  • Hardcore cryptographers
  • Illegal means of remittance and storing value in developing nations
  • Degenerate trading, gaming and gambling

Unless someone correctly identifies the problem at large and invests a significant sum of money and resources into fixing it, this outcome where the promises of "Web3" vanishes forever seems inevitable – and it is fast approaching.

When the rebels are no longer rebels

Before cryptocurrencies were invented, cryptography and distributed systems outside of large corporate, government and military environments remained an extremely niche area. While demand for tools and primitives being built by the cryptography rebels – also known as the cypherpunks – always have existed, they always remained as a small community of hackers and enthusiasts. Cypherpunk tools and technologies were always severely underfunded. The only widespread users for these tools were criminals and piracy websites. There were definitely use cases where cryptography tools were used to evade censorship and surveillance under dictatorship regimes, but they remained an absolute minority.

Because the cypherpunk community always lacked funding, the most widely used tools within that community were often secretly government-funded or transitioned to a for-profit entity. For instance, it is an open secret that the U.S. government has been the primary sponsor for the Tor project. PGP has always been proprietary, commercial software (now owned by Broadcom), and the cypherpunk community is simply adopting GPG as a FOSS replacement – compliant with the OpenPGP standard. BitTorrent also started as a for-profit corporation, and still is to this day (now owned by Tron).

Cryptocurrencies changed everything.

Liquidity started flooding into a new type of asset – built on what used to be the technology of rebels. Cypherpunk, independent cryptography became no longer niche and unprofitable. Build a blockchain, and crypto will fund you for doing whatever you were already doing – maybe even earn life-changing money!

The problem? People who demand cryptocurrency (and thereby funding development), and people who are building core technologies fundamental to enabling cryptocurrency, are two very different types of people. This is in direct contrast with literally any other industry on Earth, where developers must build whatever the market demands.

For a lot of blockchain developers, the use cases enabled by blockchain and cryptocurrency are simply a byproduct of the core technologies they are building. They are supporting privacy as a human right, funding public goods, scaling execution, and pushing the frontiers of what is possible with cryptography – be it zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, or indistinguishable obfuscation. Frankly, those are mostly theoretical problems that will take years for their research outcomes to trickle down to the end user. They are working on these technologies not because they directly benefit the end user, but rather because they are technically interesting and fun to work on.

Meanwhile, the users of public blockchains want their coins to pump, degenerous yield rates, gambling, prediction markets, and trading with immense levels of leverage. Often they want a better wallet, a better user experience, better security, and no bridging. (Of course, this only applies to users in developed markets; emerging markets are an entirely different story.)

A lot of these user-facing problems can be "duct taped" with close to zero technical edge, which is the usual way of building a business under a free market. Developers may think users would want fancy zk-based bridges and rollups to solve security and scalability, but in reality the technology being used doesn't matter at all.

This creates a weird, assymetric market, where the people actually funding projects and developers working on projects are expecting totally different things. Users and investors are not happy because they feel like developers are not working on solving their actual pain points, while developers feel like their users would not understand them in the first place – and often ignore actual user pain points.

To put it quite blatently: blockchain developers have found a loophole for institutional and retail investors & users to fund their own ambitions, that have nothing to do with what the investors & users actually want.

Who wants privacy, anyway?

So what do blockchain core developers want to work on?

Privacy-preserving, self-soverign systems. That includes: cutting-edge cryptography, scaling distributed systems, and technical enforcement of self-soverignty.

This is more so in alignment with cypherpunk "rebel cryptography", which would still have been severely underfunded if it wasn't for cryptocurrencies.

Here is a key question, however: do end users actually want privacy and self-soverignty?

This was the fundamental question that have plagued cypherpunks for two decades before cryptocurrencies helped them get funded. Before cryptocurrency, very few people were actually using these cryptography tools. And after 7 years of retail money entering the cryptocurrency market, it seems very clear that the demand for these "rebel cryptography" technologies were actually inflated due to demand for cryptocurrency, which is seen as more of a byproduct than its primary end mission.

Don't take my word for it: even U.S. government officials are sharing military secrets over Signal, a commercial messaging app, rather than using dedicated government communciation channels with advanced anti-spying techniques secured by one of the world's strongest cryptography.

This article correctly points out the problem with crypto's aspirations for privacy: "people prefer convenience over security and privacy". Vitalik himself admits this as well: "The bulk of the financial value of many of these blockchains comes from average people that want to trade cats and dogs. Privacy, in general, is definitely the sort of thing that never really succeeds." Even within the crypto space, very few people actually use privacy coins like Monero and Zcash. If you do build something with meaningful volume, like Tornado Cash on Ethereum, you will be charged with money laundering and be put behind bars.

This problem with people preferring convenience over anything else doesn't only apply to privacy. Cryptography largely serves two purposes: encryption, which corresponds to privacy; and digital signatures, which corresponds to self-sovereignty, identity, and authentication.

Bitcoin used cryptography to focus on solving the latter, meaning no one can take your coins without knowing the private keys to sign a transaction. This property is extremely useful for countries with strict capital controls – both as a store of value and to transfer value. Most "developed" nations that has money to fund infrastructure to bring this awesome technology to the masses, however, already have "good enough" systems that don't really need to be immediately fixed.

Faux-protocolization: it's good enough

If cypherpunks dream of true protocolization – frictionless experiences that never demand you surrender political agency – Apple dreams of something far more modest: good-enough magic inside a perfectly fenced garden. The Migration Assistant that ports a decade of cruft from an Intel Mac to an M-series Mac in two clicks; AirDrop that behaves as though your laptop and phone share the same bloodstream; iCloud Keychain that spares you from memorising a single password – all of it feels uncannily smooth. So smooth, in fact, that you stop noticing it.

Yet the moment you try to bring your own economic logic – running a Uniswap front-end, side-loading a game store, or shipping an app that asks for its own 30-percent-less fee – the velvet carpet vanishes and you hit concrete. Apple’s frictionlessness is not the universal solvent promised by protocols; it is a selectively applied lubricant that keeps the Cupertino machine running at maximum RPM. Where sovereignty threatens margin, the friction dial is spun to eleven.

From the outside this looks like hypocrisy. From the inside it is merely incentive-compatible design. Apple optimizes for delight inside the walled garden and for deterrence at the walls themselves. Users tolerate the bargain because, most of the time, the magic is real, and most of the time is all most users need.

Crypto infrastructure, by contrast, attempts to invert that bargain. Wallet sign-in, composable on-chain data, portable social graphs – these are designed to keep the rare, high-stakes moments of political agency firmly in the user’s own hands. Day-to-day UX suffers: seed phrases get lost, gas fees spike, signatures look scary, grandma gets phished. The protocol world is fond of saying that this pain is “the price of freedom,” but ordinary people rarely shop at Freedom’s Boutique when Costco Convenience is running a sale.

The result is an awkward coexistence of two ideologies:

  • Faux-protocolization (Apple, Google, most SaaS platforms) gives everyone 80% of the value for 20% of the mental overhead—on the condition that you never ask for the missing 20%.
  • True protocolization (public blockchains, open social protocols, self-custody wallets) offers the full hundred percent, but only if you are willing to do the homework.

In practice, markets default to the easier story. If the VPN unblocks tonight’s football stream, users will postpone the fight for universal internet freedom. If Apple Pay refunds the fraudulent charge in thirty seconds, why bother learning how to rotate private keys? This is the good-enough equilibrium: a UX ceiling set just high enough that nobody bangs their head hard enough to look for a door.

The danger for Web3 is that good enough might be permanent enough. If mainstream consumers get the parts of “crypto” they care about – near-instant settlement, 24/7 liquidity, global access – wrapped in custodial rails and banking regulations, who is left to fund the public-goods R&D of zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, or censorship-resistant roll-ups? The rebels become consultants; the protocols become plumbing; the movement becomes middleware.

Unless the crypto industry can translate its sovereignty surplus into felt day-to-day advantage – faster onboarding, cheaper remittances, social apps that actually stay yours – faux-protocolization will keep winning by default. And frankly, for most people, that might be perfectly fine.

Closing thoughts

We began with dogfooding – or rather, the conspicuous lack of it among core blockchain developers – and ended with the uneasy truce between frictionless walled gardens and sovereignty-preserving open protocols. The journey in between revealed a stubborn asymmetry:

  • Builders chase intellectually beautiful problems – succinct proofs, scalable consensus, formal-verified clients.
  • Users chase convenience, yield, status, and sometimes legality-by-ignorance.
  • Investors chase whichever narrative promises the next multiple.

When those vectors align, progress looks inevitable; when they diverge, the industry fragments into the four mini-economies we outlined: regulated fintech, hardcore cryptography, illicit value flows, and degenerate speculation. The first three have existential reasons to persist. The fourth, paradoxically, provides most of the short-term liquidity that funds the rest.

Faux-protocolization exploits that liquidity better than anyone else. It skims the cream of cryptographic innovation – hardware secure enclaves, biometric auth, secure element payments – without ever ceding the choke-points of control. And because it feels magical to ordinary users, it normalizes a standard of UX that open protocols have yet to reach.

For the original cypherpunk vision to survive, two things must happen:

  1. Relentless empathy: Core developers need to eat their own coins—swap tokens, get rugged once, try bridging on a bad day – and metabolize that pain into simpler abstractions. Convenience is not the enemy of freedom; it is freedom’s distribution channel.
  2. Strategic humility: The industry must admit that privacy and self-sovereignty are features, not religions. They will win only where they are strictly cheaper, faster, or safer for a well-defined job-to-be-done. Moral arguments rarely move adoption curves; superior user journeys do.

If we succeed, “Web3” will stop being marketed as a revolution and start disappearing into everyday life, the way AI now hides inside phone cameras and email clients. If we fail, protocolization will ossify into a boutique option for zealots and developing-world survivalists, while the rest of the world enjoys Cupertino-grade magic under perpetual licence.

Either way, good enough is not a stable equilibrium. It is a deadline. The question is whether the open-protocol community can out-innovate the garden before the gate clangs shut for good. ■