On this interview, we sit down with Pauline Shangett. She is the Chief Technique Officer at ChangeNOW and strategic advisor at NOWNodes, to debate her latest discuss at WebX titled “Head within the Clouds: Is {Hardware} the Key to Sustainable Web3 Infrastructure?”.
Pauline shares her perspective on the altering panorama of Web3 infrastructure, the myths round cloud vs. {hardware}, and why true resilience is extra about folks, processes, and technique than know-how alone.
Within the following, the CSO at ChangeNOW shares her insights on a number of the most urgent issues for Web3 and past.
Pauline, in your WebX keynote you began with a placing line: “What’s the scariest factor for a CTO? The hack? No, it’s when the whole lot fails with out warning.” Are you able to clarify what you meant by that?
Completely. Once we speak about “scary eventualities” in Web3, most individuals’s minds go straight to hacks, exploits, or malicious actors. And sure, these are terrifying. However in actuality, the conditions that shake groups to their core are sometimes a lot less complicated and extra mundane: one hearth, one missed replace, one overloaded endpoint, and abruptly your total product is offline.
This isn’t a theoretical concern. We’ve seen main platforms introduced down not due to refined cyberattacks, however due to an influence outage, a defective cable, or a misconfigured failover system. And when that occurs, you’re not simply dropping uptime. You’re dropping consumer belief, transaction quantity, and in some circumstances, your popularity.
That’s why I framed my keynote as a “actuality test.” I’m not a CTO, I don’t write code day by day, however I discuss to groups, founders, infrastructure leads, and chain builders continually. And what I’ve discovered is that this: in Web3, your largest vulnerability is commonly the one you by no means anticipated, the one exterior your assault floor however inside your operational threat mannequin. Infrastructure isn’t attention-grabbing till it fails. After which it’s the one factor that issues.
Let’s speak about cloud. Everybody is aware of the advantages like scalability, velocity, ease of use. However in your discuss, you argued that individuals overlook the safety angle. What did you imply?
The narrative across the cloud has at all times been, “It’s straightforward, it’s quick, and it scales.” And that’s true. However when folks transfer away from cloud, the commonest justification is safety. They’ll say, “I don’t need my nodes or my infrastructure managed by a centralized supplier that might censor me, minimize me off, or expose me to surveillance.”
There’s fact in that concern. Centralization on the infrastructure layer introduces dangers. However mockingly, what I see is that when folks ditch the cloud for “security,” they underestimate one other sort of threat solely: bodily threat.
Give it some thought: the cloud’s largest energy isn’t simply elasticity, it’s redundancy. If an AWS area goes down, there are a number of layers of fallback. Once you self-host your {hardware} in a single facility, you don’t have that security internet. And that’s the place folks can get blindsided.
You gave the instance of the KakaoTalk information heart hearth in South Korea, which paralyzed total companies, together with Upbit. Why is that case so necessary for the Web3 business?
As a result of it demonstrates one thing elementary: failure doesn’t should be malicious to be catastrophic. When a fireplace broke out in only one information heart in 2022, companies throughout the nation froze.
It wasn’t a hack. It wasn’t ransomware. It was smoke. But the implications have been large, customers couldn’t log in, transactions have been blocked, and the federal government needed to step in. That’s a national-level disruption brought on by a single level of failure.
In crypto, we frequently speak about “crypto winters” by way of market downturns. However I feel the extra urgent crypto winter is operational: wars, floods, fires, minimize cables, rolling blackouts. These aren’t “edge circumstances.” They’re a part of the world we dwell in. And if you happen to’re not planning for them, you’re primarily playing along with your infrastructure.
So how does NOWNodes method resilience in a different way? What does “planning for failure” appear like in follow?
At NOWNodes, our philosophy could be very easy: don’t ask if one thing will go flawed – ask when. As a result of it can. That’s the one certainty in infrastructure.
Our methods are intentionally distributed throughout a number of areas: the EU, the US, and Asia, with bodily presence in nations like Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, america, and Singapore. That’s not only a checkbox for compliance. It’s a technique of survivability: inserting nodes the place they will stand up to political, geographical, and technical dangers.
We additionally function on a 2N+1 structure. Which means for each essential part like energy, compute, community, we don’t simply have one backup. We’ve got two, plus a spare. So if one system fails, visitors shifts immediately. If the backup additionally fails, the spare takes over. It’s a layered security internet.
And we don’t simply belief the system blindly. We run common failover simulations. We deliberately shut down methods in mirrored environments to see what breaks. We do stress exams, area exams, even assault simulations. Since you don’t need the primary time you check resilience to be the second an actual disaster occurs.
For years, cloud was thought-about the cheaper choice. However you’ve recommended that equation is altering. Are you able to stroll us via that?
5 years in the past, cloud was the plain selection. You prevented large upfront CAPEX, you solely paid for what you used, and scaling felt easy. However that narrative has shifted dramatically.
In the present day, the “Massive Three” cloud suppliers, like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, dominate the market. And as occurs in any near-monopoly, pricing tendencies upward. AWS compute prices, for instance, rose by greater than 20% in only a single yr. Virtually 40% of corporations reported cloud payments spiking by over 25% within the final 12 months.
In the meantime, {hardware} has change into extra predictable. Sure, you pay extra on day one – servers, racks, energy. However whenever you unfold that funding over 7 – 10 years, the economics flip. One engineer famously calculated that an $1,100 server prices about $110 monthly over a decade. Examine that with $2,000 – $7,000 monthly for equal sources within the cloud, and the mathematics speaks for itself.
And past price, {hardware} provides you freedom. You’re not restricted to the options and configurations your cloud supplier provides. You’ll be able to patch, tweak, and deploy precisely how you should. That degree of management will be the distinction between clean scaling and bottlenecked progress.
However even with nice {hardware} or a robust cloud setup, what in case your supplier merely fails you at a essential second?
That’s precisely the purpose. Neither cloud nor {hardware} will prevent in case your supplier ghosts you at 3AM. Infrastructure is just as dependable because the folks behind it.
At NOWNodes, after we ask our purchasers why they select us, their solutions hardly ever should do with the specifics of our servers or our structure. As an alternative, they discuss concerning the human aspect, the truth that we reply inside minutes, that we scale seamlessly with out hidden billing surprises, that we help greater than 115 blockchains together with the much less apparent ones, and that when their RPC crashed at two within the morning, our crew was there fixing it in actual time.
That’s the fact: infrastructure is as a lot about belief and responsiveness as it’s about know-how.
Let’s get into the specifics: backups, multichain attain, and help. What makes your mannequin completely different?
Backups first. Nodes fail. Chains freeze. Updates break compatibility. The actual query is: when catastrophe strikes, what state do you restore? Final week’s? Final month’s? We run geo-distributed backups in order that your “worst day” turns into a small bump, not a complete blackout.
On multichain attain, most suppliers high out at 50–70 blockchains. Solely a handful, perhaps 3-5, help 100+. We help 115+ chains, and we’re continually including extra. Importantly, we don’t simply help the stylish chains. For instance, we’re the one supplier providing shared-node infrastructure for a number of the most complicated and missed blockchains: Monero, eCash, Nano, and extra. As a result of your customers received’t wait so that you can “perhaps” help their asset. They’ll go away.
Lastly, help. We don’t imagine in chatbots or limitless ticket escalations. So our purchasers get actual engineers of their Telegram or Slack. Common response time: below three minutes. Decision time: hours, not days, even for deep technical bugs. And that’s not a premium upsell. That’s our baseline.
Pricing fashions in infrastructure will be notoriously opaque. How do you method transparency?
Most RPC suppliers depend on complicated tiering, hidden throttles, and shock prices. At some point the whole lot seems advantageous, the subsequent day you’ve crossed some invisible threshold as a result of a botnet spiked your visitors, and abruptly your invoice triples. Or worse, they simply minimize you off mid-transaction.
We took a really completely different method. Our pricing is evident, subscription-based, and predictable. You at all times know precisely what you’re paying for. Once you want extra capability, scaling is quick, pretty priced, and clear. There’s no hostage negotiation.
That predictability is without doubt one of the principal causes our purchasers stick with us. As a result of in Web3, uncertainty is all over the place – within the markets, in regulation, in adoption. The very last thing you need is uncertainty in your infrastructure invoice.
So again to your unique query: is {hardware} the important thing to sustainable Web3 infrastructure?
No. And neither is cloud. The actual secret’s resilience.
Resilience comes from sensible backups, distributed methods, human-centric help, clear pricing, and true multichain attain. It’s not one thing you hire. It’s one thing you construct.
Infrastructure is boring till it’s not. Till your endpoint falls, your TVL disappears, your customers rage give up, and your logs say nothing. That’s whenever you notice infrastructure is greater than servers. It’s belief. It’s the silent contract between your product and the individuals who maintain it alive.
Closing ideas? What ought to Web3 groups take away out of your message?
I’d say this: cease treating infrastructure as an afterthought. It’s the bedrock of your product. You’ll be able to have the most effective UI, the neatest tokenomics, and probably the most loyal group, but when your infrastructure fails, none of that issues.
Don’t ask, “How do I get monetary savings this month?” Ask, “How do I survive the disaster I haven’t seen but?” As a result of it’s coming. The groups that may nonetheless be right here in 5 years aren’t those who minimize corners. They’re those who construct resilience from day one.
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