The in-house blockchain project development is a daunting proposition based on the scarcity of talent, the lengthy development cycle, and the risks associated with the source code, like smart contract vulnerabilities and increased technical debt. For most US companies that compose an internal team, a solo launch can lead to project delays and cost overruns.
Blockchain development outsourcing is one of the affordable strategic solutions enabling businesses to bypass the costly HR hiring process and integrate a full team of developers and deliver a complex dApp quickly within budget. With Agilie, you gain a reliable blockchain outsourcing partner who accelerates delivery, reduces risks, and ensures your project is built to enterprise standards.
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Outsourcing shortens the hiring cycle for specialized blockchain talents by offering cost arbitrage and access to a global talent pool.
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Outsourcing should prioritize a security-first approach in crafting the blockchain elements within short-term iterative cycles to ensure alignment with the client’s vision.
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Blockchain project completion requires meticulous documentation on secure key management, governance access rights, and ownership.
When Is the Right Time to Outsource Blockchain Development?
Outsourcing blockchain development is a strategic approach for organizations of any size, as it covers versatile needs: from covering the lack of in-house experts to scaling up the solution. Here is a breakdown of cases when blockchain outsourcing is appropriate.
Lack of In-House Expertise
Lacking in-house blockchain development experts is a significant factor that influences hiring outsourced experts. Third-party specialists bypass the learning curve, mastering niche technologies like Solidity or Rust, and applying critical knowledge in security protocols, which shortens the onboarding cycle.
Source: DiMarket.
Long Hiring Cycles or High Recruitment Costs
Recruiting specialized blockchain developers can take up to three months, if speaking about the traditional hiring process. The reasoning behind this lies in a complete hiring cycle that includes:
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Creating a hiring funnel with job descriptions.
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Shortlisting and Interviewing.
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Analysis of the candidate’s soft skills and cultural fit.
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Performing a test assignment or pair programming.
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Making an offer and conducting onboarding.
Although the process is strategically and culturally sound for in-house team expansion, it’s around 25%-30% of HR’s annual salary for the recruitment overhead.
Need to Scale Quickly or Deliver MVP
The IT market is highly volatile, so outsourcing can be a suitable strategy to hire niche experts in the Solidity programming language or ZK-Rollup professionals, bypassing the months of lengthy recruitment and onboarding. This enables businesses to apply top talent only when needed.
Flexibility is the core of any outsourcing model as it enables businesses to scale the development team up and down on demand. Adaptability is helpful for strategic budget control and efficient resource allocation during the intensive blockchain development phases.
MVP is another angle; business can outsource their blockchain development as it requires only validating the general idea and hypothesis. The client can present the potential solution, while the blockchain specialists integrate it into the decentralized mechanisms.
Key Aspects of the MVP Blockchain Project
First Blockchain Project
Architectural integrity is the first element worth considering when hiring an outsourced firm for the first blockchain projects. With scalability in mind, the IT experts tailor a blockchain system with scalability in mind by involving Layer 2 scaling solutions to prevent future system redesign when it experiences an influx in traffic.
Gas and cost optimization is the second factor that outsourced IT professionals can help the company’s first blockchain project with. Experienced developers know how to create smart contracts that reduce long-term operational costs for both B2B and regular users.
Enterprises and permissioned chains can benefit from outsourcing as the developers have deep expertise in implementing robust cryptographic techniques like zero-knowledge proofs to ensure data privacy while supporting the required transparency for governance.
Too Many Tasks, Not Enough Time
Hiring third-party blockchain developers is central to offloading task saturation. Businesses can delegate niche assignments like setting up nodes, deploying to Layer 2 networks, and conducting rigorous testing. Business representatives can focus on tasks associated with marketing and user acquisition, while the outsourced experts cover those specialized assignments.
Additionally, organizations can significantly reduce the administrative burden by operating a remote team. The outsourcing vendor takes payroll and equipment upon itself, which economizes time for internal leadership and strategic direction.
Key Benefits of Blockchain Development Outsourcing
Selecting a third-party vendor presents numerous strategic and financial blockchain outsourcing benefits that help companies reduce risks, manage costs, and keep focus on their core functions.
Flexible Budget Approach
Blockchain development outsourcing is about flexibility in the budget approach. If businesses search to craft their MVP, the fixed-fee pricing approach will enable them to get the predefined deliverables and milestones within the negotiated time and set a budget. If the company is eager to develop a complete blockchain app with an outsourcing team, the Time and Materials model can optimize resource allocation by paying only for the exact time and resources applied.
Technological Risk Prevention
For an organization new to blockchain and the world of crypto, selecting the wrong consensus mechanisms or an unsuitable blockchain network can significantly deplete the budget, requiring further rework. Blockchain development outsourcing not only mitigates the decision-making risks due to profound expertise across different platforms like Ethereum, Solana, etc., but also preserves the budget.
Increased Compliance & Reporting
By hiring the outsourcing experts who specialize in enterprise blockchain, the in-house team can maintain regulatory alignment and prepare for accurate fee and tax reporting. That’s because the hired IT professionals build features that will automatically address regulatory requirements on audit trails or permissioned access.
Access to Cross-Industry Insights
Well-established outsourcing vendors have a vast amount of diverse cross-industry projects in their arsenal, including healthcare, logistics, and fintech projects. This extensive expertise can offer unique insights and tech practices that the in-house developers might miss or not consider. Consequently, the organization can obtain an innovative blockchain solution as a result.
What the Blockchain Outsourcing Process Looks Like
How to outsource blockchain development? This process involves a structured framework that shifts from goal validation to iterative project development and complete legal handover.
Define Goals and Key Features
This step is fundamental as it determines the problem and the solutions the blockchain application will provide. Therefore, elements like smart contract logic, target chain, and security characteristics must be considered throughout the entire project scope.
Research Vendors (Clutch, LinkedIn, Referrals)
Blockchain expertise is limited on the market, so reviewing resumes and portfolios is insufficient to hire reliable partners. This process requires researching a verifiable track record with proven expertise in smart contract security, tokenomics design, and deployment of blockchain platforms. Explore the best global countries for software development outsourcing to search for reliable partners to cooperate with.
Review Portfolios and Testimonials
Portfolio review requires an in-depth analysis of evidence associated with the IT expert's expertise in blockchain development. This includes:
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Evaluation of completed security audits (from a third party, preferably).
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Additionally, businesses should check whether the live products are launched on the mainnet, as staged projects or MVPs present less operational reliability.
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Finally, evaluate the project’s adherence to KYC/AML, GDPR, or MiCA regulations to add more to the project’s credibility.
Interview Shortlisted Teams
Interviews have to include well-thought-out questions aimed at testing candidates’ proficiency, especially with common blockchain attack vectors or the proposed gas optimization strategies. Beyond technical expertise, assess experts’ communicative approaches to communicating complex ideas, providing progress transparency, and risk mitigation strategies.
Choose the Cooperation Model
Selecting a cooperation model should align with the overall scope that businesses aim to outsource. If it’s a basic MVP development, fixed-price outsourcing may be a suitable model of cooperation. It’s all about milestone precision and a determined development timeline. If the organization is interested in a full-cycle architectural design, the Time & Materials model can be an appropriate model to navigate emerging blockchain requirements, presenting flexibility if any alterations are needed.
Sign Contract and NDA
When signing a cooperation contract, one should consider NDA, IP clauses, incorporate MSA, and SOW. Let’s break down the essence and importance of each.
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NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement): underlines what project aspects are confidential before and during their development and the confidentiality duration. This includes source code, architecture, etc., for 2-5 years after the project completion.
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MSA (Master Service Agreement): is a legal framework that underlines general business terms on payment conditions, dispute resolution, warranties, and liabilities, clauses for termination, and compliance aspects.
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SOW (Statement of Work): a legal framework under the MSA that defines the overall specificity of project development, including specific deliverables, like smart contracts, UI, architecture, timeline, reporting frequency, and post-launch support expectations.
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IP Ownership & Licensing Clauses: is about clarifying the ownership of the deployed smart contract, custom code, and components of infrastructure.
Explore the essence of NDA for software outsourcing and aspects worth considering.
Start Development with Feedback Loops
This phase is about the core coding and crafting of a project, where the process is formalized because of the challenges associated with blockchain immutability.
Iterative Development
The outsourcing team or hired experts code a tiny piece of verifiable functionality with further testing. The iterative development is broken down into 1-2 week sprints, during which the client can test and approve the foundation piece before the vendor tailors another layer. This ensures the project evolves just as intended from the start of cooperation.
Continuous, Iterative Feedback
This is the mechanism by which the client can confirm the implementation matches the vision before the code is finalized. This includes regular demos or presentations of the working version of the code on a testnet. The client can hire a third-party auditor to check the written code for potential inconsistencies. This is critical, since the smart contract or blockchain is not easily altered, so error/bug detection on the testnet is central to preventing costly reworks.
Smart Contract Logic
Finally, the primary essence during these sprints is to ensure the logic is secure within the blockchain system. This development moment includes writing and testing smart contract code, mainly in Solidity, that handles value transfer, asset creation, and governance rules. The feedback loop ensures the client can verify whether the smart contract is written safely.
Run QA and Security Checks
As an undeniable part of the development process, the cooperation with outsourcing specialists should cover specialized security practices and Quality Assurance sessions, including:
Launch and Handover
The deployment and handover of the custom blockchain software development should be done with in-depth care, emphasizing documentation to establish clear operational control and legally confirm that the business has complete legal ownership of the final system.
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Deployment Documentation: this includes deployment procedures on testnet and mainnet, infrastructure setup, environment variables, and dependency documentation.
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Credential & Key Management: involves admin key transfers, governance roles, multisig wallets, secure key storage, and custody documentation.
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Governance & Access Rights: this is about defining operational ownership of who has permission to update smart contracts (if upgradable), control over validators, bridge connections, and determining admin-level access roles.
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Legal & Ownership Handover: the contract should include the confirmation that the outsourcing vendor will not retain system access after handover.
Set Up Ongoing Support
Support will focus on monitoring, off-chain system support, and bug fixing for UI/backend, since the core code is immutable. However, the contract should define a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for maintenance, especially covering security vulnerabilities that are discovered after project launch.
Key Risks and How to Avoid Them
The project development introduces specific blockchain outsourcing risks requiring active management and preventive strategies to bypass issues associated with quality inconsistencies and data breaches.
Risks for Blockchain Development Outsourcing
Summary
Outsourcing is a cost-effective approach to developing a blockchain project due to access to a global talent pool and reduced hiring costs. Strict documentation on ownership, liabilities, deployment procedures, and role-based access controls. Therefore, selecting a reliable outsourcing vendor for blockchain development requires in-depth analysis of the candidates’ portfolios, performing shortlisting and pair programming, within a continuous feedback loop.
