Hiring a Web3 development company: what to ask and what it costs

The gap between blockchain development companies is wider than in almost any other software category, and the pricing does not signal it.

Some are engineering teams that have shipped systems carrying real value for years. Some are template shops that fork a repo, change the colours and hand you something that has never seen adversarial traffic. Here is how to tell.

Ask to see something live

Not a demo. A system running now, with real users and real value moving through it.

This single request filters aggressively. Demos are cheap and every shop has one. A demo is a happy path with the failures removed — and in this category the failures are the entire job. Anyone can make a matching engine work at ten orders per second on a laptop.

Follow it with: what broke, and what did you do about it? Teams who have operated real systems have specific, slightly weary answers. Teams who have not talk in generalities.

Ask where the code is written

Who specifically writes it, where do they sit, and are they employees or subcontractors?

There is nothing wrong with distributed teams — ours spans Dubai, the United States and Noida. What matters is whether the people are consistent and accountable. A project handed to whichever contractor was available that month produces code nobody can maintain afterwards, and you find that out when you need a change six months in.

Ask what happens after launch

This is the question that most reveals whether you are talking to an engineering team or a project shop.

Blockchain systems are not finish-and-forget. New chains, dependency updates, new attack patterns, changing partner APIs. Something needs attention continuously.

Find out: do they maintain what they build, what the arrangement looks like, and what happens if you want to take the code in-house. Ask what you get on exit and in what format, and ask it before you sign, not after.

Understand where cost actually comes from

The contract is rarely the expensive part. Cost concentrates in places that are invisible from a feature list:

• Integration count. Every banking partner, custody provider, identity vendor, chain and exchange is its own build, its own edge cases and its own test surface. This is the single biggest driver.
• Custody model. Third-party providers are fast to launch with ongoing fees; a custom MPC stack is more up front and less over time.
• Chain coverage. Each additional chain multiplies monitoring, reconciliation and failure modes.
• Operations depth. The admin console and support surfaces are where your team lives every day, and they get scoped last by almost everyone.
• Audit coordination and remediation. Budget for fixing what audits find, not just for the audits.

Anyone quoting a number before understanding those is guessing at it.

The audit question

Ask directly: who audits, who pays, and who fixes what they find.

We coordinate independent third-party firms — we book and manage the calendar, and the audit report comes from them, not from us. We do not perform audits. Any development company telling you it audits its own code is describing a conflict of interest, not a service.

Two independent firms is the sensible baseline for anything holding meaningful value, plus formal verification on the parts where a bug is unrecoverable.

Where the legal line sits

A development company builds to constraints; it does not define them.

Your counsel decides what permissions you need, which markets you can operate in, and what transfer or holder rules apply to your token. Those answers shape the architecture profoundly — key management, onboarding flow, fund segregation, transfer hooks written into the contract itself — and they are extremely expensive to change after deployment.

So get them early. A development partner offering you regulatory guidance is offering something it is not qualified to give.

What we build

Exchanges and matching engines, wallets and custody, smart contracts, token infrastructure, RWA platforms, payment rails, neobanking systems, and the AI layers on top.

1,100+ projects since 2016, 95+ specialists, with the marketing team in the same building — which is why our launches do not announce features that are still in staging.