How to Build "Unbreakable" Web3 Services in an Unstable World

In the Web3 space, infrastructure rarely makes headlines. However, without it, any decentralized application, Wallet, or exchange couldn't survive a single day.

This article is based on an interview with Pauline Shangett, Chief Strategy Officer of ChangeNOW and Strategic Advisor of NOWNodes, discussing why resilience is more important than the “cloud vs hardware debate” and how the next wave of blockchain adoption depends on solidifying the fundamentals.

In the Web3 space, the most terrifying moment is not necessarily a hacker attack, but the silent collapse of the infrastructure.

When encountering a hacker attack, at least you can clarify the context of the incident:

• There are attackers
• Exploit
• Traceability

But when the infrastructure unexpectedly collapses, it feels as if the ground beneath your feet suddenly gives way. A missing patch, a fire, or an overloaded terminal can cause services to disappear completely, not due to hacking or censorship.

This is a devastating blow for Web3 teams.

Users do not care whether the failure is due to a malicious attack or an accident; they only see the service interruption. Funds cannot flow, transactions fail, and trust collapses in an instant. Infrastructure operates invisibly when functioning normally, but once it fails, it becomes the sole focus.

Reference: Cloudflare outage on November 18

Multiple websites, including social platform X and OpenAI's ChatGPT, displayed error messages to users, clearly indicating that the page could not load properly due to Cloudflare service disruptions.

Hardware is not a “Decentralization” panacea

Because decentralization cannot magically bypass the laws of physical reality. The threats faced by hardware often come from the physical world rather than the digital space.

Taking the 2022 South Korea case as an example.

A fire at the KakaoTalk data center has caused a complete paralysis of payments, logins, and even access to the country's largest exchange, Upbit. This is not a hacker attack, but rather due to smoke in the server room.

The warning significance of this case lies in revealing the vulnerability of “single point of failure.” Such events are not small probability accidents, but rather a normal component of the physical risk spectrum, including power outages, floods, fiber optic interruptions, and political turmoil.

Such events are becoming increasingly frequent, and if Web3 infrastructure is built on the assumption of “stability in the physical world”, it is tantamount to digging its own grave.

How to Specifically Address Web3 Instability?

1 Resilience starts with a distributed layout. Never put all your assets in one basket, regardless of political, geographical, or technological dimensions.

2 Secondly, there is redundancy design. Each key component (such as computing, power, network) is equipped with dual backups plus one standby unit. When the main system fails, the backup takes over, and when the backup fails, the standby unit replaces it, with the goal of achieving continuous service without user awareness.

3 The third is normalized failure testing. Power outages, simulated attacks, and active disconnection of regional connections in a mirrored environment, because the worst moments of disaster recovery failure are precisely when a real crisis erupts.

Is cost the determining factor in the battle between cloud and hardware?

The cloud was once a clear economic winner:

1. No initial investment required
2. Pay as you go
3. Scalability Without Boundaries

But now the reality is very different.

AWS, Google, Microsoft and other cloud giants monopolize the market, and the lack of competition has led to a continuous rise in prices. We have witnessed a year-on-year increase in computing costs of over 20%, with enterprise single-cycle bills surging by 25% or even higher.

At the same time, hardware costs are becoming predictable. Although there is an initial investment, when the investment is spread over a 7-10 year period, the holding costs actually show advantages.

The current value of the server is 1100 dollars, with an average monthly cost of about 110 dollars over a ten-year period. Equivalent cloud services? Between 2000 and 7000 dollars per month. The gap is huge.

In addition to costs, there is also autonomy. Bare metal architecture allows for independent control over patches, deployments, and environments, while cloud capabilities are subject to the service provider's permission settings.

Summary

Frankly speaking, neither hardware nor cloud is the future of sustainable Web3 infrastructure. The real future lies not in choosing one over the other, but in building resilience.

Build resilience through smart backups, wide distribution, transparent economic models, and a human-centered support system.

Only resilience can provide guidance.

Resilience cannot be rented; it can only be obtained through continuous construction, testing, and accumulation. Therefore, the mindset necessary for sustainable development in the Web3 industry.

Infrastructure may seem dull and unremarkable on ordinary days, but once it fails, all the highlights of the product become meaningless. If users cannot trade, RPC endpoints crash, or services disappear without warning—trust has already collapsed. Therefore, do not regard infrastructure as background noise, but rather as the backbone of the product.

Faults are inevitably preset during construction, as crises are never absent.

Teams that can survive in the next Web3 cycle will not win because of cool interfaces or meme marketing, but will rely on maintaining stable online infrastructure when the world throws curveballs.