What I’ve Learned Watching Blockchain Teams Make the Same Mistakes – Peesh Chopra

 

by Peesh Chopra

I didn’t learn most of my blockchain lessons from whitepapers or tutorials.
I learned them by watching things break — sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once.

Over the years, I’ve worked with early-stage teams, builders launching their first on-chain app, and founders who were confident they were “ready for production.” Almost all of them ran into problems that could have been avoided.

This post is my attempt to write down the lessons I keep repeating in private conversations — in one place.

Building Something That “Works” Is Easy

One of the first surprises people hit in blockchain is how easy it is to get something running.

A contract deploys.
Transactions go through.
The UI works.

Everything looks fine — until real people arrive.

That’s when the cracks start to show. The system slows down, transactions fail, indexes lag, and suddenly the app that “worked” feels fragile.

I’ve learned that working once is not the same as working reliably.

Frameworks Give Speed, Not Safety

I’m not anti-framework. I use them myself.

But frameworks create a false sense of confidence. They make it feel like the hard problems are already solved — when in reality, they’ve just been hidden.

When something breaks in production, the responsibility always lands on the team running the system. No framework can think through your edge cases for you.

Speed helps you ship.
Understanding helps you survive.

Users Never Behave the Way You Expect

People don’t read instructions.
They refresh pages.
They submit twice.
They leave and come back later.

If your app only works when users behave perfectly, it won’t last long.

The more time I spend building, the more I design systems assuming users will do the “wrong” thing — because they always do.

Most Teams Don’t Plan for Failure

I rarely see teams talk about:

• what happens if an RPC goes down

• what happens during traffic spikes

• what happens when indexing lags

• what happens if something needs to be rolled back

But failures aren’t rare events. They’re part of normal operation.

You don’t need to predict every issue — but you do need to accept that things will break.

Boring Infrastructure Matters More Than Exciting Ideas

No one gets excited about databases, logs, backups, or monitoring dashboards.

But those boring pieces are what keep systems alive.

I’ve seen great ideas fail because no one paid attention to the unglamorous parts of the stack. Once data starts going missing or desyncing, everything else becomes harder.

Thinking Short-Term Creates Long-Term Pain

Many teams want to “fix it later.”

Later usually arrives when:

• users are already angry

• money is already at risk

• changes are harder to make

Designing for growth early doesn’t mean over-engineering — it means leaving room to adapt.

What This All Comes Down To

After years of building and watching others build, here’s the simplest truth I can share:

Good blockchain systems feel boring to users.
Bad ones constantly demand attention.

If no one notices your infrastructure, you probably did something right.

I’m writing these posts to document what I’ve learned — not as advice from a distance, but as lessons earned by building, breaking, and rebuilding systems myself.

More to come.