Search for a blockchain development company and you will find long lists of firms, many of them written by the firms themselves. Size, awards and logo walls say little about the thing that matters most in this field: whether the code that holds your users' money is built and reviewed carefully, and whether you will own it when the work ends.
These are the questions worth asking any team you are considering, including us.
How do they handle security?
Smart contracts are public and hard to change once deployed, so mistakes are expensive and often permanent. Ask how a contract gets from first draft to mainnet:
- Are the rules the contract must follow written down as invariants before the code?
- Does someone who did not write the code review it before an external audit?
- Do they use fuzzing or invariant tests, not only unit tests?
- Do they recommend an independent external audit for anything holding significant value — or claim their own review is enough?
- How are admin keys held: one person, or a multisig with a time delay?
A team that says an audit "guarantees" safety is telling you something important about how it thinks about risk.
Will you own everything?
You should own the repository, the deployed contracts, the admin roles and the cloud accounts from the start — not receive them at the end. Ask where the code will live during the project, who deploys the contracts, and whose wallets hold the privileged roles.
Who will actually do the work?
Ask to meet the engineers who will build your project, not only the people selling it. Ask how many projects each person is working on at once, and whether the team that scopes the work is the team that builds it.
Can they show real work?
Ask for case studies you can check: a deployed contract address, a live product, a public repository or an audit report. Where client names are confidential, a good team can still describe the problem, the constraints and what they built in specific terms.
Do they understand the off-chain half?
Most blockchain products fail outside the contract: onboarding, wallets, fiat ramps, indexing, compliance and support. Ask how they handle key recovery, KYC integration and reconciling on-chain records with your own systems. A team that only talks about Solidity is only covering part of the project.
Is the pricing clear?
You should know the commercial model before the first call: fixed price, monthly team or day rate, and roughly what each costs. Be wary of quotes that arrive before anyone has asked about your constraints, and of very low prices for work that holds user funds.
A short checklist
- Written invariants and a security process you can read
- An external audit recommended for valuable contracts
- Multisig and timelocks on privileged roles
- Your repository, your keys, your accounts from day one
- The builders on the first call
- Verifiable examples of past work
- A plan for wallets, onboarding and compliance
- Pricing you can see before you ask