Building in Web3 as an Indie Hacker
When I first ran down the crypto rabbit hole in 2019, I had the feeling that Web3 wasn’t just a passing fad, but the cornerstone of a new financial era.
Although most indie hackers I read about were focused on the SaaS space, I was curious to build something in the Web3 domain. Thus the inspiration for OneSafe.io - aiming to seamlessly connect traditional finance (TradFi) with the decentralized world (DeFi).
One problem I always wanted to tackle was, why is it so hard to spend with crypto. This question led me to launch OneSafe Corporate cards - A way for businesses to spend 10 different tokens across 5 different networks, and the flexibility to spend USDC at a 1:1 ratio.
Getting to where we are now was not easy. I definitely do not recommend building in the fintech space as an indie hacker, unless you want to face both technological and regulatory hurdles at every turn.
It’s interesting to me because, while the indie hacker community has eagerly adopted AI, Web3 seems to lag behind, especially considering its core ethos of providing open accessibility to all devs.
However, I do believe as crypto becomes more widely adopted, we’ll begin to see an increase of indie hackers venturing into this space, which will accelerate the fly-wheel of adoption and bring web3 into the mainstream.
Given these reflections, I'm curious about your insights. Why do you think Web3 hasn't caught on as quickly among indie hackers, or perhaps are there innovative Web3 indie hacker projects out there that I just haven't heard of?
Coming from a web3 background myself, I'm curious how did you initially think on the lines of building a sustainable revenue system in this space, because web3 ecosystem tries incentivising the community first by the VC money raised and hence so many of the projects shut down when we enter a bear cycle as one can't sustain those incentives. The other challenge is to crack big enterprise partnerships for an indie dev, did you have an unfair advantage you could leverage here? Checked out Onesafe just now, kudos to you to pulling off such a project as an Indie dev; I'm sure there're quite some lessons to be learnt from you :)
Building in Web3 as an indie developer is much more sustainable when the focus shifts from hype cycles to solving real infrastructure and usability problems. The projects that survive long term are usually the ones with strong engineering foundations, scalable architecture, and operational maturity.