Alchemy’s head of product** Mike Garland** believes the next phase of Web3 adoption will be driven by applications where users no longer realize a blockchain is involved.
For him, the technical breakthroughs of the last two years, scalable L1s, reliable rollups, and excess block space, matter far less than the industry's ability to hide complexity from end users.
Invisible UX Emerges As The Real Unlock For Mainstream Web3 Adoption
In an interview with Yellow.com, Garland argues that onboarding remains the industry’s biggest friction point.
“The legacy experience of needing to download a wallet, buy a token, move funds, read documentation, then finally use an app is nonsense,” he said.
In his view, embedded wallets represent the crucial shift: sign in with email or biometrics, and a non-custodial wallet is created behind the scenes. Users don’t choose chains, manage gas, or handle seed phrases—they simply use the app.
He likens the future of Web3 UX to the internet: users don’t think about protocols, routing, or infrastructure. In Web3, these layers are still exposed. Garland believes that must disappear for real consumer adoption to begin.
Scalability Isn’t The Problem, User Onboarding Is
Despite persistent narratives about blockchain scale, Garland says the bottleneck has moved.
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Solana’s reliability improvements and Ethereum’s rollup ecosystem have created more block space than today’s use cases demand.
“The scale is already there. What’s missing are real-world apps that need it,” he said.
He sees traditional finance as the next major catalyst, with banks and payments companies preparing blockchain-powered products after years of regulatory uncertainty. These launches could reach “tens to hundreds of millions” of users—but only if developers inside those institutions learn Web3 fundamentals well enough to ship with confidence.
Traditional Finance Prepares On-Chain Products That Could Reach Millions
The profile of a Web3 builder is shifting, Garland said, as experienced software engineers from gaming, fintech, and enterprise sectors build using blockchain primitives without deep protocol expertise.
That puts pressure on infrastructure to abstract complexity without erasing the unique capabilities that make multi-chain ecosystems valuable.
Looking ahead, Garland sees programmable money as the deepest category opportunity.
Whether DeFi-native teams or traditional institutions ultimately win, he believes the deciding factor will be who pairs distribution with seamless, invisible blockchain UX.
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