For much of his career, Aleksei Voiutskii has been working on a problem that technology founders often underestimate: how to turn a product into a viable business.

He founded NODES as a marketing consultancy, later expanded its work into technology solutions, and now evaluates emerging companies from another perspective – as a private investor and business angel. Through NODES’ Startup Accelerator and Crypto Advisory practices, he also helps technology founders navigate the journey from product development to market entry and scale.

That combination of experience in marketing, user acquisition, technology, and investing gives Voiutskii a particular perspective on one of the questions facing Web3 today: what happens to a startup when the technology behind its product becomes easy to replicate?

“When I evaluate a startup, the number of impressive features it has is not what interests me most,” Voiutskii says. “I want to understand why customers would choose this particular business, trust it with their money, and keep using its product even if a competitor offered almost identical technology.”

For Web3, that question is becoming harder to ignore.

AI-powered development tools are lowering the barrier to entry. Open APIs provide access to sophisticated trading infrastructure. Features that once required substantial engineering resources can now be reproduced in a fraction of the time.

But as building a crypto application becomes easier, convincing users to trust it becomes a much more difficult proposition.

Security Isn't a New Problem. The Competitive Landscape Is.

Security has been a fundamental concern in crypto since the industry's earliest days. Over the years, companies have significantly improved the technologies used to protect digital assets. But as financial infrastructure becomes more sophisticated, risk management grows more complicated.

Today, the security of a trading platform depends on far more than the underlying blockchain or its smart contracts. Third-party providers, internal systems, authentication mechanisms, and operational procedures all contribute to the platform's overall resilience.

Recent incidents involving major crypto platforms illustrate just how much this broader infrastructure matters.

On October 29, Polymarket reported a security incident involving a third-party technology provider. The incident did not involve a vulnerability in Polymarket’s smart contracts, which continued to function as intended. As a precaution, the company temporarily suspended trading, addressed the issue, and restored platform operations. Polymarket also said it would fully compensate affected users for their losses.

On October 30, Binance published preliminary findings from a separate security investigation. The exchange outlined measures taken to contain the incident, including temporarily suspending deposits and withdrawals for additional checks and freezing some affected funds.

Binance also stated that it had found no evidence that wallet private keys had been compromised and said it intended to cover users' losses.

The incidents differed in both their causes and circumstances. But they illustrate a common reality of running a financial platform: security is not simply about preventing something from going wrong. It is also about responding effectively when something does go wrong, protecting customers, and keeping the business operational.

None of this is new to Web3.

What is changing is the competitive environment in which these responsibilities must be fulfilled.

Users now have access to a growing number of products built on increasingly similar technological foundations. As functionality becomes easier to reproduce, reliability, security, and user experience become more important ways for companies to differentiate themselves.

And trust is not built through security architecture alone. It also depends on whether a company consistently delivers on its promises to customers.

When Crypto Startups Start Thinking Like Businesses

A different challenge is emerging for the next generation of Web3 founders.

The question is no longer simply how to build technology that competitors do not have.

It is how to build a product that customers will continue choosing once similar technology becomes widely available.

That requires thinking beyond code.

These are conventional business questions. Yet for an industry whose growth has long been driven by technological breakthroughs, they are taking on renewed significance.

“Technology still matters, but access to it no longer makes a company exceptional on its own,” Voiutskii argues. “If several startups can build essentially the same product, I want to know which one understands its customers better, can deliver a more reliable service, and has a realistic strategy for growth.”

Some younger Web3 companies are already approaching product development with this logic in mind.

Rather than building every technological component from scratch, they are combining existing infrastructure around specific customer needs.

One example is Sparkling, a trading application that comes with an agent and brings together established market infrastructure and AI to simplify access to different financial instruments. AI prepares every trade, but the final tap on the Confirm button always belongs to the user.

Its approach provides a useful way to examine two distinct challenges: building a better trading tool and building a sustainable business around it.

The Trading Product: Bringing Fragmented Markets Into One Interface

Crypto traders have access to an expanding range of financial markets. But participating in them often means moving between separate applications, interfaces, and workflows.

Sparkling is attempting to reduce that fragmentation.

The self-custodial trading application provides access to perpetual futures through Hyperliquid and Lighter, prediction markets through Polymarket, tokenized US equities through xStocks, and token swaps using infrastructure that includes Bebop.

The product is available through two different interfaces.

Its Telegram application allows users to access trading tools directly within the messaging platform.

The web application, launched on October 14, offers a more comprehensive trading terminal, including an order book and additional market data for users who prefer to analyze markets and manage positions themselves.

Both versions support manual trading as well as AI-assisted workflows.

One of the application's central features is a mechanism called Pre-Executed Flow.

Instead of manually entering every parameter of a trade, users can describe what they want to do in natural language.

The AI agent then prepares an order, including the relevant parameters such as price, position size, execution route, leverage, stop loss and take profit.

The user reviews the proposed transaction and can modify its parameters or cancel it altogether.

The trade is not executed until the user explicitly confirms it.

This design addresses a broader tension facing AI-powered financial products.

According to an MEXC study published in October 2026, 84.8% of 3,708 surveyed crypto traders had used AI for market analysis or trading. Yet only 20% had experimented with allowing AI to execute trades independently, without requiring confirmation for each transaction.

The distinction matters.

Users may welcome AI assistance when navigating complex markets. That does not necessarily mean they are willing to surrender control over their money.

Security as a Product Decision

Sparkling's approach to asset control is based on a self-custodial model.

Its integrated wallet uses infrastructure provided by Turnkey, which has publicly acknowledged the integration.

According to Sparkling's published description of its architecture, the application does not hold customer funds or have access to users' private keys. Its AI agent also cannot independently sign transactions.

The architecture is intended to reduce a specific category of risk: dependence on an intermediary that holds customer assets and controls access to them.

But self-custody is not a blanket guarantee of security.

Malicious interfaces, compromised external services, and fraudulent transaction-approval requests can still expose users to losses.

Recent security incidents reinforce a broader point: the safety of a financial product depends not only on how assets are held, but on the entire infrastructure through which transactions are initiated, authorized, and executed.

Seen in that context, preventing the AI agent from independently executing transactions is an architectural choice designed to manage risk.

As similar safeguards become more common, however, their competitive value will depend increasingly on how reliably they work in practice.

A security feature can be replicated. A consistent record of protecting customers is considerably harder to reproduce.

Beyond the API: The Business of Making Integrations Work

Some of the less visible challenges facing crypto startups begin where the product demo ends.

Sparkling relies on infrastructure provided by independent companies, including Turnkey, Polymarket, Bebop, xStocks, Hyperliquid, and Lighter.

Several of these integrations have been publicly acknowledged by the respective providers.

Sparkling participates in the Polymarket Builders Program as a verified builder. Turnkey, Bebop, and xStocks have acknowledged their integrations with the application. Lighter has separately announced that its trading infrastructure is accessible through Sparkling.

These acknowledgments establish the existence of the integrations. They should not be confused with a broader endorsement of Sparkling or a commercial partnership beyond what each provider has publicly confirmed.

But even when the underlying infrastructure is available, turning multiple integrations into one coherent product involves far more than connecting a few APIs.

Trading venues have different mechanisms for authentication, order placement, fee calculation, collateral management, and settlement.

A company bringing these systems together must account for those differences while presenting users with an experience that feels consistent and understandable.

“Connecting an API is one thing. Making it part of a reliable financial product is something else entirely,” Kotlov says. “There is a tremendous amount of engineering, organizational, and operational work between gaining access to a market and building a service people genuinely find easy to use.”

This is where the distinction between technology and business becomes particularly clear.

APIs can provide access to markets. They cannot, by themselves, guarantee that users will understand an interface, complete transactions successfully, receive support when something fails, or return to the product the following week.

Those outcomes depend on the business operating behind the technology.

And as more startups gain access to the same infrastructure, the ability to deliver those outcomes consistently may become a more durable advantage than the integrations themselves.

What the Next Generation of Web3 Startups Will Have to Prove

The implications extend well beyond any single trading application.

As AI reduces development costs and more companies build on the same infrastructure, three considerations are likely to carry increasing weight in Web3 competition.

Technology must solve a real customer problem.

Access to sophisticated tools does not automatically constitute a competitive advantage. What matters is what users can actually accomplish with those tools – and whether the product makes that process meaningfully better.

Security and usability must reinforce each other.

Even a technically robust system can drive customers away if it is too difficult to use. Conversely, a convenient interface that obscures financial risks can destroy trust just as quickly.

The challenge is to make risk visible and understandable without turning every transaction into an obstacle course.

Reliability must extend beyond trade execution.

Transparent fees, consistent transaction execution, responsive customer support, and effective incident management are not secondary features. They are essential parts of a financial service.

For Voiutskii, these considerations are also becoming more important when evaluating potential investments.

“For years, startups competed for the attention of investors and users by demonstrating technologies people had never seen before,” he says. “Now, increasingly, they have to compete like any other business: provide a reliable service, understand their customers, solve real problems, and keep improving the user experience. Technology alone is no longer enough to succeed.”

The consequences of that shift could be substantial.

AI can make it easier to build a competing application. Open infrastructure can make it faster to reproduce its features.

Neither automatically produces customer trust.

The next competitive advantage in Web3 may have less to do with building something nobody else can build – and much more to do with delivering consistent value when everyone has access to the same technology.

This article was published under HackerNoon's Business Blogging program.