The Fall of Siloes is a Prerequisite for True Web3 Adoption

While there is no shortage of specialized platforms in Web3, many of them still operate in silos, focusing on a single aspect – an exchange, banking, cards, decentralized trading, etc. – without integrating with the others. Independently operating decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, the Ethereum-based AMM (automated market maker); Curve Finance, a stablecoin-focused DEX; and dYdX, a layer-2 decentralized perpetual trading platform, are all effective in their own right. Platforms like Aave and Compound excel at offering services like interest, loans, and savings. Aave is an autonomous lending and borrowing protocol, and the equally well-known Compound offers interest-earning lending and borrowing. Wallets like MetaMask and Phantom are popular and focused on access, identity, and holding assets.

Then, there are crypto cards like Crypto.com and Binance Card. Crypto.com offers Visa cards, cashback in CRO, and staking features, and Binance allows users to spend crypto via a Visa card. Yet, these services remain siloed.

Fully integrated experiences are crucial to Web3 adoption

Albeit being a great deal more challenging to achieve, a fully integrated experience is critical for complete user satisfaction. Gleec was established in 2015 as a comprehensive blockchain ecosystem that aims to secure and simplify digital asset management, combining different services into a cohesive experience.

DeFi ecosystems make efforts to create bridges, and some of the dApps running on them try to cover everything, but many are still siloed. The evolution from DeFi version 1 (DeFi v1) to DeFi v2 holds promise for the Web3 landscape and users. The first version was typified by highly incentivized ecosystems, offering unsustainable yields that failed to maintain user interest due to rising security risks and dwindling returns. While innovative, the initial offerings often resulted in complicated, monolithic structures that were hard to navigate. Cross-chain bridges aim to overcome the inherent limitations of siloed networks, but they’re far from immune to vulnerabilities, such as unaudited smart contracts, unsecured private key management and upgradability processes, unproven validator sets, dependency on a single network, etc.

The multitude of layer-2 blockchains on Ethereum reflects efforts to overcome siloes. Many of them are EVM-compatible, so users can deploy contracts and assets across chains with minimal friction and no need to rebuild everything. L2s attempt to improve on Ethereum in terms of speed, privacy, cost, or scalability. However, the adjustments can paradoxically make the chain even more isolated, and it becomes harder for users to figure out how and where to get things done. It’s also challenging for developers to determine which chain to build on. If they do manage to build a faster and cheaper blockchain, it might be less secure with lower liquidity and fewer users.

Eliminating the need to seek one app after another

While many siloed applications are effective on their own, the user is left to seek another application for each additional demand. On Gleec, the user can take advantage of integrated blockchain infrastructure, crypto cards, centralized and decentralized exchanges, secure communication, banking solutions, and full regulatory compliance. Its secure, licensed infrastructure also powers Raphael Coin, a cryptocurrency that enables fractional ownership of a Renaissance artwork recently rediscovered by Dorotheum, a historic auction house founded in the 18th century.

The independent blockchain infrastructure features a Delayed Proof of Work (dPoW) consensus mechanism, which improves security by leveraging Bitcoin’s hashing power to notarize blocks, making attacks on Gleec much costlier. The ecosystem includes a crypto-friendly Visa card for crypto spending, an encrypted communication app), a DEX, a BTC exchange for digital asset trading, and Gleec Pay, which lets you create an IBAN directly within the exchange for fiat-to-crypto integration. The BTC exchange is a centralized trading platform offering a wide range of trading pairs, fiat integrations, and advanced trading features. The DEX (also a non-custodial wallet) enables peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading, giving users full control over their assets.

Causes and effects of Web3 fragmentation

Siloed applications lead to liquidity fragmentation, where a user who holds tokens on different blockchains faces trouble if they want to use them all on one chain. They must first trade or bridge assets from Arbitrum or Base to Optimism (for example), pay high transaction fees, and invest significant effort to figure out complex procedures. This takes a lot of time, and concepts like pre-provisioning gas drive away non-technical users.

Inefficiencies in liquidity management discourage potential users from adopting dApps. What’s more, Web3 fragmentation is draining value and stunting the growth of a highly lucrative industry. Technological incompatibility is among the root causes of fragmentation. This direct tradeoff of decentralized ecosystems harms user experience and creates problems for developers, such as redundancies. Inefficiencies are driven by the need to build products and services like lending, DEXs, stablecoin minting, etc., across ecosystems in an environment that requires their replication at an exponential rate. Developers focus on replicating a few successful use cases across ecosystems rather than seeking integration and can’t afford to pay as much attention as needed to products that can make Web3 more appealing to mainstream users.

The activity would be higher if users didn’t need multiple accounts or gas tokens and to bridge funds for cross-chain operations manually. Additionally, projects suffer from unrealized innovation as they cannot build on a maximally decentralized and scalable base layer.

Web3 inefficiency in numbers

The total VC funding of the crypto industry peaked at $11 billion in Q1 of 2022 but plummeted thereafter and didn’t start increasing again until early 2024. In Q1 of 2025, it reached $4.8 billion but is still below the Q3/2022 level of $6.5 billion. While user numbers increase in line with rising investments, ecosystem growth is stagnant when you isolate different chains to look at their popularity. Only Solana and a few Ethereum L2s experienced growth in the first half of 2024, supporting the view that fragmentation has become more pronounced and that established ecosystems’ tactics mainly attract users from each other, further driving fragmentation. Solutions like Gleec will not single-handedly solve the Web3 fragmentation crisis, but their adoption is a step in the right direction.

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