Do not look for blockchain software houses on popular agency listings.

All those present directories like clutch, goodfirms, etc are coming from traditional web2 structures and they put blockchain as a regular category similar to i.e. web design.

Why is it wrong?

Mostly because blockchain & Web3 are by at least one order broader term than it is currently presented. It requires greater granulation like centralized exchange is in the blockchain category same as decentralized staking dapp they all have something to do with blockchain/cryptocurrencies but by no means they should belong to the same category.

What else is wrong?

Well, since software agencies are never 100% blockchain-focused it is a popular trend to add blockchain to the portfolio of offered services and kind of like pretend to be long in a web3 business, with plenty of happy customers while in fact, they have so few in common with i.e. smart-contracts development or blockchain security audits.

The change

In many cases, the tremendous difference is in change management and bug solving. While in web2 we are used to making things iteratively and “work fast break things and fix them” it is not the case for blockchain development companies. There is hardly any iterative approach in important blockchain domains. Software needs to be good from day one, well-tested and bug-free.

In blockchain production quality sound totally different than in any agile web2 company.

The responsibility

There are few industries where developers’ responsibility is the highest i.e people’s life is at stake. And there are many places where there is less or none. For sure in blockchain and web3 little bugs in a smart contract can lead to critical risks for reputation and most importantly customer funds.

1. What type of project should you not commit to?

Ask this question during the initial call. It is important, especially for small boutique-size web3 software houses. They should know their limits and understand that they exist.

Good to hear:

We say no to projects too big for us (i.e. DEXes). We also never commit to projects we find unethical.

Red Flag:

We are not afraid of any challange and never say to our clients

2. Will it be 100% secure?

The true answer is there is no such thing as 100% secure. Moreover, this whole security depends on you as a customer as well. Saying anything that can make you not worry about the security of your project is wrong. You, even not being a technical person, should well understand the risks and be present in discussions on mitigating those.

Good to hear:

No we can’t promise it. We do our best but the overall safety is also customer and users responsibility.

We do a lot to secure best in class safety like external audits, code reviews, static code analysis, automatic tests.

We use battle tested libs like OpenZeppelin

Red Flag:

100%. This is an easy project and we’ve never had any problems.

3. Have you got a pre-release checklist?

This is a must. There are many things to remember and in the last phase of the project, there is always a lot of rush and pressure. Let’s not pretend anyone can ever skip one or two points if there is no written down routine of pre-release tasks to follow

Good to hear:

Yes we use checklist with general best practices and we added our own point to remember. These additional points are in fact our lessons learned. Also we will be happy to share it with you so that we are transparent about the security

Red flag:

Yes we do but this is our internal one and we are not likely to show it to you.

or

These all checklists are for noobs only.

4. Any projects on Mainnet?

A great question to ask. Having experience on Mainnet may be a deal breaker, not because it is super hard to push to Mainnet but because it requires much more attention and care plus customer’s trust.

Good to hear:

From X project we have developed, Y are deployed on production and Z are heavily used, high-value contracts securing user funds.

Here are links to those projects on etherscan where you can read verified source code and analyze balances and txs

Red flag:

Yes a lot, unfortunately all of those are protected with NDAs. We really have serious customers only

5. It seems easy why does it cost so much?

Even simple smart contracts that differ very little from those already on the mainnet require some constant amount of work to make things reliable and verified and tested.

Good to hear:

Most expensive is making sure the smart contract will do only what we want it to do and nothing more

The implementation itself is indeed easy with ready-to-go libraries That is not a major cost. The price comes from solution design, analysis and verification.

Red flag:

It only looks easy, but there is plenty of programming here. We need to code it from scratch and programmers are expensive

Companies selected manually based on truly blockchain projects in their portfolio

3dev.io blockchain-focused software house

ethworks.io blockchain-focused software house

rumblefish.dev blockchain-focused software house

uigstudio.com blockchain-focused software house

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