In this interview, we sit down with Pauline Shangett. She is the Chief Strategy Officer at ChangeNOW and strategic advisor at NOWNodes, to discuss her recent talk at WebX titled “Head in the Clouds: Is Hardware the Key to Sustainable Web3 Infrastructure?”.
Pauline shares her perspective on the changing landscape of Web3 infrastructure, the myths around cloud vs. hardware, and why true resilience is more about people, processes, and strategy than technology alone.
In the following, the CSO at ChangeNOW shares her insights on some of the most pressing matters for Web3 and beyond.
Pauline, in your WebX keynote you started with a striking line: “What’s the scariest thing for a CTO? The hack? No, it’s when everything fails without warning.” Can you explain what you meant by that?
Absolutely. When we talk about “scary scenarios” in Web3, most people’s minds go straight to hacks, exploits, or malicious actors. And yes, those are terrifying. But in reality, the situations that shake teams to their core are often much simpler and more mundane: one fire, one missed update, one overloaded endpoint, and suddenly your entire product is offline.
This isn’t a theoretical concern. We’ve seen major platforms brought down not because of sophisticated cyberattacks, but because of a power outage, a faulty cable, or a misconfigured failover system. And when that happens, you’re not just losing uptime. You’re losing user trust, transaction volume, and in some cases, your reputation.
That’s why I framed my keynote as a “reality check.” I’m not a CTO, I don’t write code every day, but I talk to teams, founders, infrastructure leads, and chain developers constantly. And what I’ve learned is this: in Web3, your biggest vulnerability is often the one you never expected, the one outside your attack surface but inside your operational risk model. Infrastructure isn’t interesting until it fails. And then it’s the only thing that matters.
Let’s talk about cloud. Everyone knows the benefits like scalability, speed, ease of use. But in your talk, you argued that people overlook the security angle. What did you mean?
The narrative around the cloud has always been, “It’s easy, it’s fast, and it scales.” And that’s true. But when people move away from cloud, the most common justification is security. They’ll say, “I don’t want my nodes or my infrastructure controlled by a centralized provider that could censor me, cut me off, or expose me to surveillance.”
There’s truth in that concern. Centralization at the infrastructure layer introduces risks. But ironically, what I see is that when people ditch the cloud for “safety,” they underestimate another type of risk entirely: physical risk.
Think about it: the cloud’s biggest strength isn’t just elasticity, it’s redundancy. If an AWS region goes down, there are multiple layers of fallback. When you self-host your hardware in a single facility, you don’t have that safety net. And that’s where people can get blindsided.
You gave the example of the KakaoTalk data center fire in South Korea, which paralyzed entire services, including Upbit. Why is that case so important for the Web3 industry?
Because it demonstrates something fundamental: failure doesn’t have to be malicious to be catastrophic. When a fire broke out in just one data center in 2022, services across the country froze.
It wasn’t a hack. It wasn’t ransomware. It was smoke. Yet the consequences were massive, users couldn’t log in, transactions were blocked, and the government had to step in. That’s a national-level disruption caused by a single point of failure.
In crypto, we often talk about “crypto winters” in terms of market downturns. But I think the more pressing crypto winter is operational: wars, floods, fires, cut cables, rolling blackouts. Those aren’t “edge cases.” They’re part of the world we live in. And if you’re not planning for them, you’re essentially gambling with your infrastructure.
So how does NOWNodes approach resilience differently? What does “planning for failure” look like in practice?
At NOWNodes, our philosophy is very simple: don’t ask if something will go wrong – ask when. Because it will. That’s the only certainty in infrastructure.
Our systems are deliberately distributed across multiple regions: the EU, the US, and Asia, with physical presence in countries like Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, the United States, and Singapore. That’s not just a checkbox for compliance. It’s a strategy of survivability: placing nodes where they can withstand political, geographical, and technical risks.
We also operate on a 2N+1 architecture. That means for every critical component like power, compute, network, we don’t just have one backup. We have two, plus a spare. So if one system fails, traffic shifts instantly. If the backup also fails, the spare takes over. It’s a layered safety net.
And we don’t just trust the system blindly. We run regular failover simulations. We intentionally shut down systems in mirrored environments to see what breaks. We do stress tests, region tests, even attack simulations. Because you don’t want the first time you test resilience to be the moment a real crisis happens.
For years, cloud was considered the cheaper option. But you’ve suggested that equation is changing. Can you walk us through that?
Five years ago, cloud was the obvious choice. You avoided massive upfront CAPEX, you only paid for what you used, and scaling felt effortless. But that narrative has shifted dramatically.
Today, the “Big Three” cloud providers, like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, dominate the market. And as happens in any near-monopoly, pricing trends upward. AWS compute costs, for example, rose by more than 20% in just a single year. Almost 40% of companies reported cloud bills spiking by over 25% in the last 12 months.
Meanwhile, hardware has become more predictable. Yes, you pay more on day one – servers, racks, power. But when you spread that investment over 7 – 10 years, the economics flip. One engineer famously calculated that an $1,100 server costs about $110 per month over a decade. Compare that with $2,000 – $7,000 per month for equivalent resources in the cloud, and the math speaks for itself.
And beyond cost, hardware gives you freedom. You’re not limited to the features and configurations your cloud provider offers. You can patch, tweak, and deploy exactly how you need to. That level of control can be the difference between smooth scaling and bottlenecked growth.
But even with great hardware or a strong cloud setup, what if your provider simply fails you at a critical moment?
That’s exactly the point. Neither cloud nor hardware will save you if your provider ghosts you at 3AM. Infrastructure is only as reliable as the people behind it.
At NOWNodes, when we ask our clients why they choose us, their answers rarely have to do with the specifics of our servers or our architecture. Instead, they talk about the human side, the fact that we respond within minutes, that we scale seamlessly without hidden billing surprises, that we support more than 115 blockchains including the less obvious ones, and that when their RPC crashed at two in the morning, our team was there fixing it in real time.
That’s the reality: infrastructure is as much about trust and responsiveness as it is about technology.
Let’s get into the specifics: backups, multichain reach, and support. What makes your model different?
Backups first. Nodes fail. Chains freeze. Updates break compatibility. The real question is: when disaster strikes, what state do you restore? Last week’s? Last month’s? We run geo-distributed backups so that your “worst day” becomes a small bump, not a total blackout.
On multichain reach, most providers top out at 50–70 blockchains. Only a handful, maybe 3-5, support 100+. We support 115+ chains, and we’re constantly adding more. Importantly, we don’t just support the trendy chains. For example, we’re the only provider offering shared-node infrastructure for some of the most complex and overlooked blockchains: Monero, eCash, Nano, and more. Because your users won’t wait for you to “maybe” support their asset. They’ll leave.
Finally, support. We don’t believe in chatbots or endless ticket escalations. So our clients get real engineers in their Telegram or Slack. Average response time: under three minutes. Resolution time: hours, not days, even for deep technical bugs. And that’s not a premium upsell. That’s our baseline.
Pricing models in infrastructure can be notoriously opaque. How do you approach transparency?
Most RPC providers rely on complex tiering, hidden throttles, and surprise charges. One day everything looks fine, the next day you’ve crossed some invisible threshold because a botnet spiked your traffic, and suddenly your bill triples. Or worse, they just cut you off mid-transaction.
We took a very different approach. Our pricing is clear, subscription-based, and predictable. You always know exactly what you’re paying for. When you need more capacity, scaling is fast, fairly priced, and transparent. There’s no hostage negotiation.
That predictability is one of the main reasons our clients stay with us. Because in Web3, uncertainty is everywhere – in the markets, in regulation, in adoption. The last thing you want is uncertainty in your infrastructure bill.
So back to your original question: is hardware the key to sustainable Web3 infrastructure?
No. And neither is cloud. The real key is resilience.
Resilience comes from smart backups, distributed systems, human-centric support, transparent pricing, and true multichain reach. It’s not something you rent. It’s something you build.
Infrastructure is boring until it’s not. Until your endpoint falls, your TVL disappears, your users rage quit, and your logs say nothing. That’s when you realize infrastructure is more than servers. It’s trust. It’s the silent contract between your product and the people who keep it alive.
Final thoughts? What should Web3 teams take away from your message?
I’d say this: stop treating infrastructure as an afterthought. It’s the bedrock of your product. You can have the best UI, the smartest tokenomics, and the most loyal community, but if your infrastructure fails, none of that matters.
Don’t ask, “How do I save money this month?” Ask, “How do I survive the crisis I haven’t seen yet?” Because it’s coming. The teams that will still be here in five years aren’t the ones who cut corners. They’re the ones who build resilience from day one.
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