The Web3 space moves fast, but building reliable infrastructure for decentralized applications still feels like a grind. Downtime, failed retries, and brittle off-chain logic continue to be pain points across the stack. That’s why we're excited to share how DBOS simplifies error handling for Web3 applications and makes them durable and resilient to failures.
DBOS brings durable workflows, exactly-once execution, and observability to your backend logic.
Whether you're resolving prediction markets, or powering AI agents, your app can bounce back from failure automatically.
Here’s how DBOS unlocks new capabilities for popular Web3 use cases:
DeFi Protocols
DeFi protocols are decentralized financial applications that allow users to lend, borrow, trade, or earn yield without relying on traditional intermediaries.
Without DBOS: DeFi apps typically rely on cron jobs or custom daemons to trigger interest payouts, liquidations, or rebase logic. Order matching and trade settlement often depend on retry queues or external bots, while developers must manually implement idempotency and retry behavior to avoid duplication or errors.
Problems: Failures mid-process can result in lost transactions or inconsistent state updates. Race conditions are common, especially during reward distributions and liquidations. Debugging these issues takes time and adds friction to development.
With DBOS: Developers can define complex flows like trade settlement or staking rewards as DBOS workflows using @DBOS.workflow() and @DBOS.step(). Each step is checkpointed to Postgres, so if the app crashes, it resumes from the last known good state. DBOS ensures durable execution and exactly-once semantics, removing the need for manual retry logic.
Predictions Markets
Predictions markets are platforms where users place bets on the outcome of real-world events, like elections or sports and earn rewards based on the accuracy of their predictions.
Without DBOS: In predictions markets, smart contracts typically manage escrow, while resolution logic relies on off-chain oracles and backend services. Payouts are handled by scheduled jobs or bots, and teams often manually track which markets have been settled.
Problems: If the system crashes during resolution, users may never receive their payouts. Long-duration markets add complexity because they require persistent state management. The lack of observability makes it difficult to troubleshoot failed settlements.
With DBOS: The entire lifecycle of a market can be represented as a workflow. A developer can model market resolution in steps—first, waiting for oracle data, then resolving the outcome, and finally distributing payouts. If a crash occurs at any point, DBOS will resume from the last completed step. Logs and traces provide transparency across the full flow.
AI Agents
AI agents in Web3 are autonomous or semi-autonomous programs that interact with decentralized systems and users, often powered by large language models and designed to execute tasks, provide insights, or manage workflows. A popular emerging use case is token launch pads powered by AI agents, where tokens are deployed programmatically based on predefined rules, like triggering a bonding curve if a certain amount of liquidity is locked. These agents operate across smart contracts and off-chain systems, enabling dynamic, event-driven token launches.
Without DBOS: AI agents are usually stateless scripts or isolated API calls. More advanced interactions require developers to stitch together logic manually, and there's no built-in way to pause for user input or resume work after a delay.
Problems: State persistence is difficult, and if the process crashes, the agent loses all context. Additionally, without observability, it's hard to trace the agent's decision-making or behavior.
With DBOS: Agents can be broken down into deterministic steps inside a DBOS workflow. Developers can introduce pause points that wait for user input or external signals. If a crash happens, the workflow continues where it left off. This structure is ideal for long-running, human-in-the-loop workflows or persistent autonomous agents.
Web3 Games
Web3 games integrate blockchain mechanics like asset ownership, play-to-earn, and verifiable game logic, giving players more control and transparency in their gaming experience. However, not all parts of these games run on-chain—doing so would be too expensive and slow. Typically, only critical components like item ownership, token rewards, and marketplace transactions are stored on-chain, while most of the gameplay logic and real-time interactions remain off-chain.
Without DBOS: Game logic is often tied to in-memory data or services like Redis, which makes long-running processes fragile. Scheduled events such as crafting, rewards, or spawns are implemented with external timers, and turn-based systems require manual tracking of player state.
Problems: If the server restarts or crashes, players can lose progress or encounter bugs. Managing consistency across multiple sessions is complex. There is often no visibility into the backend logic during gameplay.
With DBOS: Game logic like turn-based mechanics or crafting systems can be modeled as workflows. Each checkpoint preserves player state and game progress. Time-based actions can sleep within workflows, ensuring actions happen at the right time without relying on external crons. This improves the player experience and reduces operational overhead.
Add the Open Source DBOS Transact Library to Your Web3 App
Whether you're building DeFi infrastructure, launching an AI agent, or designing a web3 game, DBOS gives you infrastructure to build a reliable application. Stop duct-taping failure recovery, DBOS gives you reliability baked in. No more rebuilding the retry queue. No more cobbled-together crons. Just stateful, observable, reliable backend logic, straight out of the box.
DBOS makes application reliability effortless for Web3 use cases. Just import the open source DBOS Transact library into your code and add a few simple annotations, connect it to a Postgres-compatible database (in which to store execution state), and you're all set.
Check out the DBOS quickstart to get going.
