Key Takeaways
- Despite massive capital and top-tier talent, blockchain hasn’t produced a mainstream app like Amazon or TikTok.
- Business models relying on high volume and low margins don’t work on Ethereum.
- Psy Protocol CEO Carter Feldman says Web3 now serves the wealthy and has lost its decentralization vision.
After years of buzz, massive funding rounds, and a steady drumbeat of technical milestones, crypto still hasn’t delivered the one thing that truly matters: something millions of ordinary people use.
The space is saturated with protocols, tokens, and hype cycles — but where’s the Web3 version of a household name?
This disconnect isn’t lost on Carter Feldman, the founder of Psy Protocol, who believes the answer isn’t in more speculative assets or faster L2s — it lies in rethinking the very foundations of blockchain infrastructure.
Why Crypto Still Hasn’t Delivered a Breakout Consumer App
A decade into the Ethereum (ETH) era, the blockchain industry has yet to produce a consumer application that rivals Amazon or TikTok.
According to Carter Feldman, CEO of Psy Protocol, this isn’t a failure of imagination, investment, or engineering talent—it’s a result of architectural limitations that prevent current blockchain networks from scaling effectively.
In Feldman’s view, the more popular an app becomes in the crypto ecosystem, the more unusable it gets.
Viral growth leads to fee spikes, slower transactions, and a degraded user experience—the exact opposite of what defines success in consumer technology.
“The fundamental issue isn’t talent or capital, it’s that the architecture of existing blockchains makes it mathematically impossible for these business models to work. That’s the opposite of how successful consumer apps operate,” Feldman notes.
Why Ethereum Can’t Perform Like Amazon
He points out that platforms like Amazon rely on tens of thousands of concurrent users to stay profitable.
Even under ideal conditions, Ethereum can’t support that activity level, even with zero-fee transactions.
As a result, most crypto applications end up serving niche, high-margin markets.
“You can make a successful Ponzi scheme with just 30 customers, but if you have a game with 30 customers, you’re never going to break even,” Feldman said.
“High-value financial transactions work because people will pay $50 in fees to move $100,000. But if you’re trying to build the next eBay, those fee structures are completely unviable,” he added.
High TPS as the Missing Link Between Web3 and Real Utility
Feldman is the CEO of Psy Protocol, and at the heart of its mission is throughput — specifically, the ability to process millions of transactions per second.
However, for Feldman, high TPS is less about raw speed and more about unlocking the economics that enabled the rise of Web2 giants.
“High TPS isn’t just about speed, it’s about enabling entirely different economic models. You unlock the same business models and applications that allowed Web2 to eat the world,” he notes.
He contrasts this with TikTok, where the cost of serving one more video is almost zero, enabling aggressive user acquisition and frictionless scale.
Current blockchains operate in reverse: each new user makes the network slower and more expensive for everyone else.
He designed the Psy Protocol so that the marginal cost of adding new transaction proofs is near zero. This allows developers to sponsor gas fees on behalf of users, eliminating one of the biggest UX hurdles in crypto.
“Suddenly, you can build games where users don’t need to worry about gas fees, or social platforms where posting and interacting are free for end users,” Feldman highlights.
The founder believes that the proper infrastructure unlocks the right business model, and the right business model unlocks user experiences that people want.
A New Approach to Decentralization and Proof of Work
Beyond technical performance, Feldman believes Web3 has drifted from its original mission. What began as a vision for a user-owned internet has, in many ways, become an exclusive financial playground for the wealthy.
“What really drives me is that we’ve lost sight of what Web3 was supposed to accomplish. We’ve created this parallel financial system that mostly serves people who are already wealthy enough to pay high transaction fees,” Feldman says.
Rather than abandoning decentralization, Feldman wants to fix it by returning to first principles. Psy Protocol uses a reimagined proof-of-work system where users prove their transactions and miners collaborate to aggregate proofs.
Its design aims to be more secure, decentralized, and scalable than anything else.
Ultimately, Feldman isn’t just trying to improve the status quo.
“The goal isn’t just to build another blockchain. It’s to create an infrastructure that can actually support the applications people want to use, with the security and decentralization properties that make Web3 meaningful,” he said.
“We have the technology now to do this right. The question is whether we’ll actually use it or keep building incrementally better versions of systems that fundamentally don’t work for the scale we need,” Feldman concluded.
