From Niche to Global
I remember when Web3 felt like a secret club. You knew the lingo, the protocols, the Twitter memes. If you didn’t? Good luck. Signing a transaction was a mystery, and even just buying an NFT meant going down a rabbit hole of wallets, bridges, gas fees, and more. But Web3’s next billion users will be entering a space that looks very different—one where complexity is abstracted away, and accessibility comes first.
Fast forward to today, and everything’s changing.
Founders aren’t just building for crypto-native degens anymore. They’re thinking big. I’m talking really big. As in: Web3’s next billion users.
And from where I sit in the recruitment trenches? It’s the teams behind the scenes that are making it possible. So let’s talk about who they are, what they’re building, and how it’s working (or not).
UX First, Crypto Second
The biggest shift I’ve seen lately? Teams prioritising user experience over blockchain flexing.
Take embedded wallets. Back in the day, you had to fumble through MetaMask and pray it didn’t break mid-transaction. Now? Projects like Privy, Web3Auth, and Capsule are letting devs abstract all of that away. Users log in with email or social accounts, and boom—wallet created, keys managed behind the scenes.
I placed a product manager last year into a consumer app that was built on Solana. They told me their #1 design rule: “Never mention the word blockchain on the main onboarding flow.” It’s not about hiding the tech—it’s about not overwhelming people who are new to it.
If we want the next billion users, we can’t expect them to learn crypto first. We have to meet them where they are.
Infra That Just Works
You can’t build a skyscraper on sand. Same goes for onboarding the masses into Web3—we need solid foundations.
That’s where infra teams come in. From account abstraction to gasless transactions to lightning-fast L2s, these are the unsung heroes of scale.
One standout example is the team behind Base, Coinbase’s L2 built on Optimism. I’ve worked with a few of the engineers who joined early, and they’re laser-focused on performance and reliability. Their mission? Make crypto feel as smooth as a Web2 app.
Same goes for zkSync, Starknet, and Arbitrum. These aren’t just rollups with fancy math—they’re attempts to make decentralisation usable at scale.
Hiring into these teams is brutally competitive. Everyone wants engineers who understand cryptography and have experience scaling high-traffic systems. Not an easy combo to find. But when you do? Game changer.
The Content Layer is Heating Up
It’s not just infra that’s hot. Media, gaming, social—they’re all going Web3-native, and it’s wild to watch.
I placed a creative technologist into a decentralised gaming studio last year. Their brief? Make NFT ownership so seamless, players don’t even realise they’re interacting with a blockchain. The result? A mobile game that feels like Candy Crush but runs entirely on-chain.
Then there’s Lens Protocol and Farcaster, which are building decentralised social networks from the ground up. No ads, no algorithms hijacking your feed—just social graphs you own.
Why does this matter? Because content is culture. And if we want Web3’s next billion users, we need to tap into the platforms they already spend their time on. That means creators, streamers, influencers—and the devs who build the tools they use.
Emerging Markets Are Leading the Charge
Here’s a fun fact: some of the fastest-growing Web3 adoption isn’t happening in Silicon Valley. It’s happening in Lagos. In Mumbai. In Manila.
Teams like Paychant and Fonbnk are building crypto rails for Africa. I worked with a startup out of Nairobi that was onboarding gig workers into DeFi with just a smartphone and WhatsApp. No seed phrases, no jargon, just value.
In Latin America, wallets like Belo and Lemon are making it dead simple to save in stablecoins and send remittances across borders.
These aren’t just side projects. They’re lifelines. And the teams behind them? They’re some of the scrappiest, most mission-driven builders I’ve ever come across.
When we talk about Web3’s next billion users, we need to remember: many of them aren’t coming from the App Store. They’re coming from places where traditional finance has failed.
What’s Working (and What’s Not)
From the hiring frontlines, here’s what I’ve seen move the needle:
- Hire local: If you’re building for emerging markets, get talent from those markets. They know the pain points.
- Design around outcomes: Users don’t care about block times. They care about: “Did the thing work?”
- Abstract complexity: Nobody wants to read a whitepaper to send money.
- Test in the wild: Ship MVPs fast, gather feedback, and iterate. Perfect is the enemy of adoption.
The flipside? Projects that treat onboarding like an afterthought get stuck in pilot mode. I’ve seen amazing tech die on the vine because no one could use it without a CS degree.
It’s Not Just About the Tech
We spend so much time talking about protocols, stacks, and chains. But what’s really going to unlock Web3’s next billion users?
People.
The teams who obsess over UX. The ones who understand cultural nuance. The ones who test with real users, not just devnet wallets.
I’ve been in this game long enough to know it’s never just about who writes the best code. It’s about who builds for people, not just power users.
So if you’re hiring, building, or just trying to figure out where to focus: start with the humans. The tech will follow.
