TL;DR: After three years of building in Web3, I’ve made peace with one truth — the stack you choose defines how far your product will go. Here’s what I rely on now and what I won’t touch again.
🧱 Why Infra Still Matters in Web3
Everyone loves to talk about user adoption and tokenomics. But let’s be honest:
most Web3 products break not because the idea is bad — but because the stack fails.
Either RPC limits, slow indexing, unreliable storage, or your infra bill makes you cry.
I've worked with dApps, DeFi protocols, and NFT platforms — and here’s my updated take on what actually works in 2025.
🗂️ Storage: IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave?
IPFS is great for quick deployment, but painful for pinning and uptime guarantees.
Filecoin offers economic incentives, but onboarding is slow and fragmented.
Arweave — my current choice for permanent public data (like NFT metadata or frontend hosting).
✅ It’s reliable, cheap in the long run, and battle-tested.
🚫 I wouldn’t build anything critical on IPFS alone today.
🌐 RPC & Node Providers
You basically have 3 routes:
Alchemy — clean, scalable, but pricey.
QuickNode — faster launch, solid tooling.
Self-hosted nodes — power + control, but heavy maintenance.
I now use QuickNode for staging/dev, and self-hosted Geth + Erigon for prod-critical flows.
💡 Tip: Always set fallback nodes. RPC outages are not a question of “if”, but “when”.
📈 Indexing and Querying
The Graph: solid, especially with substreams. But not great for complex joins or relational data.
Custom indexers: we now build our own with Postgres + Docker + simple ETL jobs.
Pain upfront, but full control over schema, speed, and cost.
If your product depends on multi-chain querying — roll your own.
🔐 Custody & Asset Management
For treasury and asset flows, custody matters more than most startups realize.
Centralized exchanges (like WhiteBIT) now offer B2B custody APIs — way faster than building from scratch.
MPC wallets sound cool, but the setup and UX still suck for teams.
🧠 Lesson: custody is infra. Design it like infra.
⚙️ Final Stack Snapshot (2025 Edition)
Layer Preferred Tooling
Storage Arweave (perma), S3 (temp/private)
RPC QuickNode (dev), Self-hosted Geth (prod)
Indexing Custom Postgres + ETL + cron
Frontend Next.js + Vercel (yes, still solid)
CI/CD GitHub Actions + Docker + Tailscale
Custody/API WhiteBIT B2B Custody + hot wallet rotation
🧩 Final Thoughts
The flashy parts of Web3 come and go.
But if your infra is solid — your product survives bear markets, DDoS attacks, and gas spikes.
I’ve built enough “too-fast” MVPs to know: choose boring but reliable over cool and flaky.
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