Kevin Mohan | CEO, Big Star Blockchain
Building in Web3 doesn’t feel like Twitter threads make it sound.
It doesn’t feel like a bull market… or a bear market either.
Most days, it feels like building infrastructure while the ground underneath is still being surveyed.
That’s the part people don’t talk about enough.
Execution is the moat. The market just makes it obvious.
The romance fades quickly. The work doesn’t.
From the outside, Web3 is still framed as fast, permissionless, and disruptive.
From the inside, it’s slower, heavier, and far more operational than most founders expect.
You’re not just building a product. You’re building trust layers — with customers, partners, utilities, regulators, and capital.
And the timelines don’t match:
markets move faster than standards technology evolves faster than procurement narratives change faster than infrastructure can
That gap is where most projects struggle.
The hardest part isn’t technology. It’s coordination.
The tech stack is rarely the bottleneck.
Talent exists. Hardware exists. Capital exists.
What’s hard is aligning:
long equipment lead times power availability that’s real (not theoretical) partners who show up after the PO is signed investors who understand infrastructure doesn’t pivot on a tweet
In Web3, you’re often explaining why discipline matters to people trained to expect velocity.
That tension doesn’t go away.
You just learn to manage it.
You build through cycles — whether you want to or not
One thing founders don’t get to choose: timing.
If you’re still standing after your first cycle, you learn quickly:
bull markets reward speed bear markets reward structure
The companies that survive are rarely the loudest. They’re the ones that quietly:
document everything standardize what doesn’t need to be bespoke invest in systems that work at low margins, not just peak ones
At Big Star Blockchain , a lot of our real progress happened when nobody was watching — refining EPC playbooks, designing repeatable site layouts, and building relationships with partners who think in years, not quarters.
That work compounds later.
Infrastructure forces honesty
Web3 is full of abstraction. Infrastructure removes it.
Power either shows up — or it doesn’t. Cooling either works at density — or it doesn’t. Hardware either runs continuously — or it fails.
There’s no narrative hedge against physics.
That’s why we gravitated early toward infrastructure-grade components and partners. Groups like BiXBiT USA fit naturally into our work — not because of branding, but because standardized racks, power modules, and cooling architectures reduce variability.
Less variability means fewer surprises. Fewer surprises means better outcomes for investors.
That’s not Web3 ideology. That’s operations.
The emotional reality no one posts about
Founders talk about vision.
They don’t talk enough about responsibility.
When you’re building real infrastructure:
delays affect livelihoods design mistakes ripple for years capital decisions have long tails
You carry that weight quietly.
There are moments — especially in downturns — where conviction isn’t about belief.
It’s about discipline: showing up, fixing problems, and not overreacting to noise.
It’s not glamorous. But it’s real.
Why staying grounded matters
Web3 attracts extremes: extreme optimism and extreme pessimism.
Founders who last tend to sit somewhere in the middle:
optimistic enough to keep building skeptical enough to pressure-test assumptions
They don’t confuse adoption with tweets. They don’t confuse demand with funding rounds. They don’t confuse innovation with skipping steps.
They build things that still make sense if the story changes.
What I’d tell founders starting now
If you’re early in the journey:
build slower than you want to — but cleaner choose partners who behave well when things go wrong design for the second and third cycle, not the first don’t optimize for applause; optimize for uptime
Web3 doesn’t need more promises. It needs more operators.
Final thought
Building in Web3 isn’t about being early.
It’s about being durable.
Technology will keep evolving. Narratives will keep rotating. What remains are the systems built to operate under real constraints.
At Big Star Blockchain , that’s how we approach mining farms and data centers: infrastructure first, optionality built in, discipline over hype.
That mindset isn’t always loud — but it lasts.
Question for the room: For those building in Web3 right now — what’s been harder than you expected, and what’s been more grounding than you thought?
If you’re building infrastructure (or thinking about what it actually takes), I’m always open to a technical conversation.
