When I first heard about smart contracts, I thought they were the perfect solution—self-executing, trustless code that removed human intervention completely. It sounded like the dream: no middlemen, no delays, no uncertainty.
But the first time I actually built a dApp, I realized something most developers eventually discover: smart contracts aren’t automatic at all. They sit there waiting, like engines without ignition. Unless someone—or something—triggers them, they don’t move.
That gap between expectation and reality is where so many of our struggles live. Behind the promise of automation, most of us are still relying on cron jobs, backend scripts, and even spreadsheets. The irony is painful: we’ve decentralized the contracts but not the operations.
Where Developers Actually Struggle
Talk to any Web3 developer for five minutes, and the frustrations begin to pour out. I know, because I’ve been in those same conversations:
- “Our payouts keep getting delayed.” → Usually because the off-chain script quietly failed.
- “Governance is useless in our DAO.” → Proposals pass on-chain, but execution gets bottlenecked off-chain.
- “Contributors don’t trust the system anymore.” → Because manual oversight always introduces inconsistency.
- “Oversight stays manual, mistakes pile up.” → Untested commits, broken pipelines, and code shipping before it’s ready.
- “The cracks start showing fast.”” → Merge conflicts left hanging, tests skipped, and half-baked code making it into production.
- “Manual checks always backfire.” → Reviews get delayed, scripts fail silently, and contributors lose confidence in the process.
I felt this pain firsthand in the DAO I worked with. We had incredible contributors and solid contracts, but everything in between felt broken. Payouts were tracked in spreadsheets. Votes were executed manually. Notifications depended on bots that went down without warning.
And the worst part? It wasn’t the contracts that made people doubt the DAO. It was the workflows around them. Contributors trusted code more than humans—but all too often, humans were still in the loop.
Spreadsheets Don’t Scale DAOs
At first, spreadsheets feel harmless. They’re easy, flexible, and everyone knows how to use them. Add a bot here, a cron job there, and you think you’ve built “automation.”
But scale is unforgiving. More contributors mean more payments to track. More proposals mean more governance outcomes to enforce. More users mean more pressure on systems that were never built to handle growth.
In my DAO, I watched this problem explode. What worked with 10 contributors collapsed at 100. Suddenly, we had hours of manual work just to keep things moving. A payout missed here, a proposal delayed there—and soon, people stopped trusting the system altogether.
Spreadsheets and bots don’t scale. They’re duct tape solutions that hide the cracks, but when pressure mounts, the cracks become impossible to ignore.
The Wake-Up Call
The turning point came when I realized we weren’t failing because of our contracts. We were failing because of our coordination.
The contracts executed just fine. The problem was everything else—the reminders, the approvals, the “who’s responsible for clicking send” moments. That’s when it clicked for me: we weren’t running on rules. We were running on humans pretending to be rules.
And humans, as committed as they may be, are unreliable systems. They forget. They get sick. They lose track. That’s not a knock on people—it’s just reality.
I asked myself: What if we designed the DAO so that rules executed themselves?
From Workarounds to Rules
Once I started thinking in terms of rules, everything changed. Instead of patching with bots and spreadsheets, I looked at every workflow and asked:
- Does this rely on someone remembering?
- Does this require manual confirmation?
- Does this happen off-chain with no record?
If the answer was yes, it meant the workflow wasn’t truly decentralized. It was fragile.
So we began rethinking:
- Payouts → encoded in workflows that released automatically when milestones were met.
- Governance → proposals didn’t just pass, they executed outcomes on-chain.
- Treasury management → Instead of ad hoc human approvals, workflows determined spending thresholds and allocations.
- Task management → contributor roles and rewards tied directly to on-chain verification, not a spreadsheet cell.
This wasn’t just automation for convenience. It was automation for building trust. When contributors saw rules executing themselves, they stopped doubting. They stopped waiting for answers. They started believing again.
How Automation Helped Me
This realisation is exactly why I started working on kwala.
We didn’t want developers stuck writing fragile glue code forever. We didn’t want DAOs patching operations with spreadsheets and cron jobs. We wanted to make workflow automation native to Web3.
Kwala is a workflow automation protocol for DAOs, with a built-in workflow builder as one of its core features. Instead of writing another brittle script, you define policies declaratively—who gets paid, when proposals trigger actions, and how treasury limits are enforced. Kwala enables those workflows to be executed across both on-chain and off-chain systems.
The promise is simple:
- No more human bottlenecks.
- No more “who forgot to click send.”
- No more broken trust.
Just rules, running themselves.
Automation Restores Trust
Here’s something I learned the hard way: developers aren’t just writing code. We’re holding the trust of an entire community.
Every time a payout is delayed, trust erodes. Every time a vote is ignored, trust erodes. Every time someone says, “Let me check the spreadsheet,” trust erodes.
But when the system delivers consistently—when workflows enforce themselves—trust grows. Contributors stop worrying about “when” or “if.” They know outcomes will follow actions.
For developers, this shift is liberating. We stop firefighting. We stop patching. Instead of chasing after workflows, we get to focus on building. And for communities, it’s transformative. They finally see decentralization working the way it was meant to: fair, transparent, and reliable.
Lessons for Fellow Developers
If you’re building in Web3 today, here are the questions that reshaped how I approach every project:
Where am I relying on humans as rules?
If the success of your system depends on reminders, approvals, or manual clicks, you’re building fragility, not trust.
What workflows still live off-chain?
If core processes depend on spreadsheets or servers, ask yourself: what happens when those fail?
Can contributors verify outcomes without me?
Transparency isn’t just about open contracts. It’s about making sure outcomes are verifiable, predictable, and automatic.
For me, these questions turned into a roadmap. And each time I replaced a manual patch with an enforceable rule through kwala, the DAO became stronger. Not just technically, but socially.
The Bigger Picture
Web3 is often sold on the power of smart contracts. But contracts are only half the story. Without workflows that execute reliably, we’re just shifting spreadsheets from one platform to another.
The future I want to see isn’t just contract-driven. It’s rule-driven. Web3 should be less about complexity and more about getting things done, and I think Kwala is one promising platform that can actually make it happen.
A future where payouts don’t depend on who remembered. Where governance isn’t stuck in limbo. Where contributors don’t have to trust people to do what the code should have done.
Smart contracts aren’t automatic. But when paired with enforceable workflows, they can finally deliver on their promise. That’s when decentralisation stops being a theory and starts being a reality.
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