Case Study: Developer-First Web3 Services Platform

TL;DR

What began as a grind of migrations, gas quirks, and opaque APIs ended as a production-ready platform that reduced days of friction into minutes of flow, proving that with the right abstractions, any developer can build on Web3 without needing to be a blockchain expert.

The Situation: Simplifying Blockchain Primitives

Integrating directly with blockchains is notoriously painful. Developers have to learn smart contracts, wrestle with gas fees, handle network quirks, and juggle tooling just to do something basic like generate a verifiable random number.

The project’s goal was simple but ambitious: turn blockchain primitives into developer-first APIs. Instead of reinventing the wheel, a developer could hit a REST endpoint and get back results, like: randomness, proofs, off-chain computations, without needing deep Web3 knowledge.

The Challenges

The real difficulty wasn’t any single blocker, but the accumulation of small, hidden operational headaches that made multi-chain development slow and error-prone.

• Database Migrations (Prisma + PostgreSQL): My first serious ORM project. While Prisma was great for writing queries, migrations constantly broke with cryptic sync issues, sometimes corrupting the schema. I learned that migrations can add more friction than they remove if not handled pragmatically.
• Multi-Chain Deployment Pain: Every network (Polygon, Arbitrum, etc.) had its own quirks — gas, verifications, IDs. Building a reliable process to deploy, verify on Etherscan, and generate correct ABIs for every network was painstaking, meticulous work.
• Tooling Gaps: Chainlink’s VRF dashboard showed which contracts were tied to a subscription, but there was no exposed API for developers to query this data. We were essentially flying blind without automation.

Together, these created what I call the “thousand-cut problem” of Web3 engineering: death not by one big failure, but by dozens of small, recurring frictions.

The Solution: Automation & Abstraction

I took a pragmatic approach, building out three layers of solutions:

Part 1: The Deployment Factory (CI/CD)

I designed and coded a complete multi-chain deployment pipeline with Hardhat.

• Automated testing, deployment, and verification across all supported networks.
• Scripts generated ABIs for the frontend and ensured contracts were registered + verified every time.
• CircleCI and GitHub Actions replaced full-day manual processes with one-hour automated reviews.

This transformed deployments from chaos into a repeatable factory.

Part 2: The Pragmatic API Hack

To solve the Chainlink subscription blindspot, I reverse-engineered their frontend.

• Used browser dev tools to capture GraphQL calls from their dashboard.
• Replicated the internal, undocumented subscription endpoint in our backend.
• Automated the missing API functionality for our platform.

This hack unblocked core functionality, proving I could pragmatically ship solutions instead of waiting for upstream fixes.

Part 3: Developer-First Abstraction (VRF + Functions)

Beyond raw infrastructure, I focused on developer experience. For example:

• A dev could hit our API with a request like: “Give me 4 dice rolls with 20 faces.”
• Under the hood, the system:
  1. Called Chainlink VRF for a large provably random seed.
  2. Passed that seed into a Chainlink Function, splitting it into four verifiable dice rolls.
• The endpoint responded with the dice rolls and embedded proofs/URLs for verification.

For the developer, it felt like a simple REST call. In reality, it orchestrated multiple smart contracts, off-chain computation, and verifiable randomness.

The Impact

The tooling and abstractions I built had measurable impact on velocity and complexity:

• 8x Faster Deployment Cycles: Reduced multi-chain contract deployments from a full 8-hour day to approximately 1 hour with review.
• Radical DevEx Improvements: Transformed days/weeks of learning Solidity, gas math, and VRFs into minutes of coding with a clean REST API.
• Ecosystem Recognition: As an early adopter of Chainlink Functions, our deployment IDs across networks were in single digits. My direct feedback was sought by the Chainlink team to shape product improvements.

Reflections & Key Strengths

This project reinforced what I see as the essence of engineering: abstracting complexity through pragmatism and automation.

• Systems Design & Automation: Designed full CI/CD pipelines and scripted multi-chain deployments.
• Pragmatic Problem-Solving: Reverse-engineered API gaps to ship solutions fast.
• Developer-First APIs: Made complex blockchain workflows (VRF + Functions) accessible through simple endpoints.
• Full-Stack Execution: Delivered across contracts, backend infra, APIs, and frontend integration.