I didn’t expect a blog post to affect me this much.
But that’s exactly what happened when I read a piece by Anit, the CTO of Altius Labs. Not once but 5 times. Every time I closed it, something inside me stirred. It was equal parts comforting and unsettling.
Because it turns out: I wasn’t the only one who found Web3 hard.
I’m a Web2 developer used to building backends, APIs, interfaces — all the pieces of a working product. I didn’t come to Web3 because of market hype. I came because of a simple question:
“Can I actually deploy a smart contract that works?”
That’s when the journey began — a journey far messier than I imagined.
I started small: cloned a repo, tweaked a few lines, deployed to a testnet. But every time I switched blockchains, things fell apart. Code that worked on one chain would freeze up on another. Sometimes it was an RPC error. Sometimes a version mismatch. Sometimes… there was no error at all just broken code and blank screens.
It felt like being dropped into a maze with a torn-up map.
Hours passed in silence. Just me, a black terminal window, meaningless logs, and an empty explorer. At times I honestly asked myself:
“Am I the problem, or is Web3 just too damn hard?”
Then I stumbled on Anit’s blog: “Why Developer Experience Is the Real Moat in Web3.”
It wasn’t some dry technical article. It was the voice of someone who truly understood the pain developers like me were going through. The kind of struggle I always thought I was alone in.
Because here’s the truth:
Web2 is hard. Web3 is harder. 😓
I grew up with create-react-app, with projects that booted in a single command. Everything was familiar. In Web2, if something broke, a stack trace pointed me to exactly where. I could rollback, debug, test, deploy all with a clear process. Most importantly: I had docs, a community, and support.
In Web3? I often felt completely alone.
SDKs were brittle. Tools didn’t speak to each other. Errors popped up with no clue what they meant. Documentation often stopped at “Hello World” — and left the real-world scenarios to silence.
For a while, I thought I just wasn’t good enough.
But after reading Anit’s blog, I realized:
Maybe Web3 isn’t ready for developers or at least, it’s not treating them like it should.
“Web3 isn’t lacking tech. It’s lacking empathy for developers.”
And that’s when I started seeing Altius in a new light.
They’re not just building infrastructure.
They’re building for the people who will use that infrastructure — developers. An execution layer that’s VM-agnostic, language-flexible, testable locally, with up-to-date docs based on real user feedback.
That’s rare in Web3 — a space still obsessed with tokenomics, TPS, and wallet counts. But Altius seems to understand something deeper:
If Web3 is to truly grow, it needs to start with the people building it one line of code at a time.
I haven’t launched a complete Web3 product yet.
But I’ve seen enough to know what makes many developers hesitate.
And I know I’m not alone.
If you’ve ever spent hours debugging in silence: you’re not alone.
I’m not writing this to complain.
I’m writing it for every Web2 dev taking their first awkward steps into Web3:
I see you. I’ve been there. I’m still there.
And if you’re building a Web3 platform, please remember:
Developers aren’t just users of your ecosystem.
They’re the ones bringing it to life.
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