Building resilient Web3 infrastructure in an unstable world: Interview with Pauline Shangett, Chief Strategy Officer at ChangeNOW

Infrastructure rarely makes headlines in Web3. Yet without it, no DApp, wallet, or exchange could survive a single day. Cryptopolitan sat down with Pauline Shangett, Chief Strategy Officer at ChangeNOW and Strategic Advisor at NOWNodes, to discuss why resilience is more important than the cloud-versus-hardware debate and how the next wave of blockchain adoption will depend on getting the foundations right.  

Infrastructure and risk

Pauline, you’ve said that in Web3, the scariest moment isn’t necessarily a hack, but the silent collapse of infrastructure. Why do you see that as such a critical distinction?

Because when you’re hacked, at least you know what happened – there’s an attacker, an exploit, and a narrative you can point to. But when your infrastructure fails unexpectedly, it feels like the ground is disappearing beneath you. One missed patch, one fire, and one overloaded endpoint, and suddenly your service isn’t hacked or censored; it’s just gone.

For a Web3 team, that’s devastating. Users don’t care whether it was malicious or accidental; they just see downtime. Funds can’t move, transactions fail, and trust erodes instantly. That’s why I emphasize this point: infrastructure may be invisible when it works, but it becomes the only thing that matters when it doesn’t.

The industry tends to romanticize hardware as the “decentralized” alternative to the cloud. Yet in your talk, you cautioned against seeing hardware as a silver bullet. Why?

Because decentralization doesn’t magically protect you from real-world physics. The threats to hardware are often physical, not digital. Look at South Korea in 2022: a single fire in a KakaoTalk data center brought down payments, logins, and even access to one of the country’s largest exchanges, Upbit. It wasn’t a hack. It was smoke in a server room.

That case is important because it shows how fragile “single points of failure” can be. And these aren’t rare freak accidents; they’re part of a broader landscape of physical risks: blackouts, floods, cable cuts, and political instability. These things are happening more often, not less. And if your Web3 infrastructure is built on the assumption that the physical world is stable, you’re setting yourself up for disaster.

Building resilience

So how do you actually prepare for instability? What does resilience mean in practice for NOWNodes?

For us, resilience starts with distribution. We operate across multiple strategic regions – Europe, North America, and Asia, with physical presence in countries like Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, the U.S., and Singapore. That’s intentional. You don’t want all your eggs in one basket, whether that basket is political, geographic, or technical.

Second, it’s about redundancy. Our infrastructure follows a 2N+1 model: for every critical component, whether it’s compute, power, or network, we maintain two backups and an additional spare. So if one fails, the system keeps going. If the backup fails, the spare takes over. The goal is continuity without the user ever noticing.

And third, we constantly test failure. We shut down systems in mirrored environments, we simulate attacks, and we cut regions offline on purpose, because the worst time to discover your failover doesn’t work is when you’re in the middle of an actual crisis.

Cost has always been a deciding factor between cloud and hardware. How do you see the economics shifting today?

The cloud used to be the obvious financial winner; you avoided upfront investment, you only paid for what you used, and scaling felt infinite. But now, the reality is very different. The big cloud providers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft control the market, and with limited competition, prices only move upward. We’ve seen compute costs rise by more than 20% year-over-year, and companies reporting surprise bills jumping 25% or more in a single cycle.

Meanwhile, hardware is becoming more predictable. Yes, you need to invest upfront, but when you stretch that investment over seven to ten years, the math actually favors ownership. A server that costs $1,100 today ends up being about $110 a month over a decade. The equivalent in the cloud? Two to seven thousand dollars per month. That’s a massive gap.

And beyond dollars, there’s freedom. On bare metal, you control your patches, your deployment, your environment. On the cloud, you’re limited to what your provider decides you’re allowed to do.

That makes sense technically, but what about the human factor? What happens if a provider doesn’t support you when it matters?

That’s where most teams underestimate risk. Neither the best hardware nor the most optimized cloud setup matters if your provider disappears when you need them. What our clients consistently tell us that their loyalty isn’t about the hardware we use; it’s about the way we respond.

They value that our engineers answer in minutes, not hours. They trust that we can scale with them without surprise costs. They appreciate that we support more than 115 blockchains, including the more complex ones that others avoid. And perhaps most importantly, they know that if something breaks at two in the morning, we’re online, fixing it live. That’s not marketing. That’s the day-to-day reality of why they stay with us.

Support and pricing models are often pain points in Web3 infrastructure. How does your approach differ?

In support, we’ve taken a hard stance: no chatbots, no endless ticket chains. If you reach out to us, you’re talking directly to an engineer who can solve your problem in real time, whether it’s through Slack, Telegram, or another channel. Our average response time is under three minutes. For complex bugs, resolution happens in hours, not days.

On pricing, we reject the “gotcha” model that’s so common in the cloud world, where invisible limits throttle you, or a sudden traffic spike turns into a tripled bill. Our subscriptions are transparent. You know exactly what you’re paying for, and scaling up is fast and predictable. That stability allows teams to plan for growth without fearing that their infrastructure costs will suddenly sink them.

The future of a sustainable Web3

To wrap up, is hardware the future of sustainable Web3 infrastructure? Or is the cloud still king?

Honestly, neither. The real future isn’t about choosing one or the other. It’s about resilience. You build resilience by combining smart backups, wide distribution, transparent economics, and human-centric support.

Cloud or hardware alone won’t save you. Resilience will. And resilience isn’t rented. It’s built, tested, and earned over time. That’s the mindset we bring to NOWNodes, and it’s the mindset I believe the entire industry needs if it wants to grow sustainably.

Final thoughts for founders and teams building in Web3 right now?

My message is simple: infrastructure is boring until it isn’t. But when it fails, nothing else about your product matters. If your users can’t transact, if your RPC endpoints are down, if your service disappears without explanation – you’ve lost their trust.

So don’t treat infrastructure as background noise. Treat it as the backbone of your product. Build with the assumption that something will break. Because it will. The teams that survive the next cycle of Web3 won’t be the ones with the flashiest UI or the best meme marketing. They’ll be the ones whose infrastructure kept them online when the world threw them a curveball.