Top 7 Mistakes Web3 Startups Make with Infrastructure (And How to Avoid Them)

Building in Web3 is exciting—but also unforgiving. Narratives shift fast, capital dries up faster, and what you deliver in the immediate 3–6 months can define your long-term survival.

Yet despite all the innovation, the biggest killer for most Web3 startups, alongside product-market fit and user growth, is its infrastructure decisions made too early, too hastily, or in isolation.

Let’s break down the 7 most common infra mistakes Web3 startups make—and more importantly, how to avoid them.

1. Trying to Build Everything In-House

Web3 founders love control—and that’s fair. But control often turns into obsession. Teams start building their own oracle layer, custom wallet SDKs, homegrown payment modules, even RPC infra—only to burn 6–12 months and run out of capital with nothing market-ready.

Yes, your infra should be composable. But that doesn’t mean you should reinvent the wheel. The problem isn’t just time—it’s that any wrong infra decision made early becomes expensive and hard to reverse. You end up maintaining systems that don’t contribute to your actual value proposition.

What to do instead? Identify what’s core to your product—and outsource the rest to partners who already specialize in it. Let your engineers build the product, do development, and not be kept busy in the infra layers.

2. Forgetting That Timing > self-developed Tech in Web3

In Web3, you’re not just building a product—you’re riding a narrative, also. That narrative may have a 6-month attention window. If AI agents are hot now, you need to launch in that window. 

But if you’re still writing custom infra for months—custom wallet, custom rollup infra, self-hosted APIs—you become an engineering company, not a product company. You miss the narrative window, and no one cares that your infra is elegant.

Focus on time-to-market. Get something working, launch fast, and grow into complexity. Don’t over-engineer your way out of the spotlight.

3. Picking the Wrong Stack

Last year was all about rollups. This year, everyone’s launching Avalanche L1s. Does that mean rollups are dead or Avalanche L1s are perfect for every use case? Not at all.

The truth is—most stacks offer overlapping features: token creation, privacy layers (ZKsync’s Prividium or Avalanche’s eERC20), interoperability (Superchain or Avalanche Teleporter). But the nuances matter—performance, ecosystem maturity, integration support, governance model, validator flexibility, etc.

The mistake? Teams often pick a stack based on what’s trending, not what’s optimal for their use case. Worse, they rely on stack-native infra providers who are biased. Avalanche will never tell you ZKsync Prividium fits your needs better. And ZKsync will never pitch Teleporter as a great option for composability.

Avoid bias. Work with providers who support multiple stacks—Arbitrum Orbit, ZKsync, Avalanche L1s, OP Stack, Parachains, Cosmos SDK—and can give an honest comparison based on your use case.

4. Getting Locked into a Single Provider

Pivoting is real in Web3. Projects evolve, use cases shift, new chains launch, narratives flip. If your infrastructure is locked to one provider who only supports one stack, you’re stuck.

Want to move from a rollup to an L1? You might lose your testnet history, resync the mainnet from scratch, or even face downtime. Your tooling, monitoring, and APIs might need to be rebuilt. Worst case, your chain halts during the migration.

The smarter move is to choose providers that support migration, offer flexible stack support, and don’t penalize you for changing direction. In Web3, adaptability is survival.

5. Ignoring SLAs

It’s not uncommon anymore—“Arbitrum One halted for two hours,” “ZKsync stopped producing blocks,” “Optimism sequencer offline.” These headlines aren’t black swan events—they’re becoming frequent reminders that chain infra is fragile.

If your node provider doesn’t have a clear SLA, redundant nodes, auto-healing, and proper failover mechanisms in place, your app becomes collateral damage. When infra fails, it’s your users who suffer..

Solution? Demand SLAs. Ask about uptime guarantees, redundancy models, and recovery processes. Infra shouldn’t just work on a good day—it should recover fast on a bad one.

6. No Monitoring, No Visibility, No Alerts

Nobody wants to manually stare at a node dashboard 24/7. But when something goes wrong—node crashes, resource limits hit, sync issues begin—you should know immediately.

Without live alerts, you’ll only discover issues after your users do.

And if your team has to stitch together Grafana, Prometheus, uptime bots, Slack scripts, and log viewers just to stay in the loop, that’s already a bottleneck.

What to do? Choose a provider or infra stack that gives you real-time alerts via Slack, Teams, Email, etc, gives you monitoring access through mobile—for both blockchain-level metrics and infra-level metrics. You need full visibility across uptime, latency, missed blocks, query failures, and more, in a single pane of glass.

7. Overpaying for the Same Infra Everyone Else Gets Cheaper

This one hurts—but it’s real. Many Web3 infra providers are charging 3–5x for the exact same service that could be delivered at a fraction of the cost.

An Avalanche L1 testnet can cost you $50/month if you know where to look. Yet some charge close to $1000 or more for the same configuration. Rollup testnets? Same story. It’s not about a one-time setup only. The recurring management cost is huge, too.

The catch is—most founders don’t compare pricing vs value. They get sold on “fully managed” but don’t ask the right questions.

Fix it. Evaluate based on output, not packaging. Check who their clients are, what kind of infra they’ve delivered, and what their SLA looks like—then look at the price. If it doesn’t align, move on.

Final Thoughts:

Web3 is unforgiving of infra mistakes. Unlike Web2, there’s no room for “we’ll fix it later.” Infra decisions affect your time-to-market, product agility, narrative fit, and operational runway. Get it right, and you accelerate ahead. Get it wrong, and you spend months untangling cost, complexity, and contracts.

So don’t let infra slow you down. Make the right decisions early—use flexible stacks, choose providers with range, enforce accountability, and never let infra distract you from what really matters: building a product people actually want to use.

Also Read: Here is Why Kubernetes Automation is Important for your Company