Web, Software & Blockchain Case Studies

A company site needs many pages for services, regions and guides, and each page needs its own title, description and links. Writing them by hand does not scale.

One React codebase where service, location, guide, blog and Zavik pages come from data files. The build writes the sitemap and pre-renders every page. The stylesheet is inlined, and the Poppins font files are served from the site itself.

Each location and guide page has its own title, description and FAQ markup. Job pages read from a database when it is connected. We checked the site at screen widths from 320 to 2560 pixels and fixed anything that was cut off on phones, tablets or large monitors.

Buyers search for a service in a place or on a topic. Each search needs a page that answers it honestly, with its own details, questions and next step.

Each page is a data entry with an intro, sections, FAQs and a call to action. One page component renders them all, adds FAQ and breadcrumb markup, and can embed a calculator or a live demo after a chosen section.

The 12 groups cover regions, countries, Google Workspace, blockchain, India and guides. Every group follows the same rules, and the sitemap picks new pages up automatically.

Twitter wanted its mobile website to load faster, keep people engaged and use less data.

It built a progressive web app. Service workers cache views and assets, the first HTML is streamed, and only what the visible screen needs is loaded. Media is smaller by default, and a data saver mode lets people choose when media downloads. It also added an install prompt and web push notifications.

First load over 3G takes under 5 seconds on most devices, and repeat loads under 3 seconds. Average load time for logged-in users fell 30%, and data use while scrolling timelines fell by as much as 70%. Each day about 250,000 people open it from their home screen.

Pinterest's old mobile web experience was slow, and only about 1% of unauthenticated mobile web visitors signed up, logged in or installed the app.

The team rebuilt the mobile site as a progressive web app and cut the core JavaScript bundle from 650 KB to 150 KB.

Time spent rose 40%, user-generated ad revenue rose 44% and core engagements rose 60%. On an average Android phone over slow 3G, time to interactive fell from 23 seconds to 5.6 seconds on a first visit, and to 3.9 seconds on repeat visits.

Flipkart shut its mobile website in 2015 as part of an app-only strategy. It then wanted a mobile experience that combined the reach of the web with the speed and re-engagement of a native app.

Flipkart Lite loads fast, browses offline and adds a home screen icon so shoppers can come back in one tap.

Visits lasted about 3.5 minutes, up from 70 seconds on the previous mobile experience. Re-engagement rose 40%. Of Flipkart Lite users, 63% arrived on 2G networks, and 60% of visits started from the home screen icon.

AliExpress wanted mobile web visitors to get the speed, offline support and re-engagement of an app, without having to install one.

It built a single progressive web app that works across browsers, including Safari on iPhone.

Conversion for new users rose 104% across all browsers and 82% on iOS Safari. Visitors viewed twice as many pages per session, and sessions lasted 74% longer on average.

The team wanted app-like engagement from its web app without building and maintaining separate iOS and Android apps.

It added a custom install prompt using the beforeinstallprompt event, plus a manual install guide for people who missed the banner. Service workers built with Workbox cache CSS and JavaScript first, and refresh rarely changing images in the background.

Over one month, people who installed the app visited 310% more often than other web users and had 150% higher sales per customer. Retention was 450% higher than in the previous mobile web flow. These figures compare people who installed the app with people who did not, so they do not prove that the install itself caused the gain.

Tinder wanted a web app that loads quickly and stays affordable for people in markets where mobile data is costly.

The team split code by route and preloaded critical bundles. It switched to Atomic CSS and set size limits for each bundle. A Workbox service worker caches the app shell for repeat visits.

Route-based splitting cut the main bundle from 166 KB to 101 KB and DOMContentLoaded from 5.46 to 4.69 seconds. Preloading saved about a second. Atomic CSS lowered the average page load from about 6.75 to about 5.75 seconds. The write-up does not include business metrics.

Vodafone wanted to know whether faster pages really sell more. It split paid traffic 50/50 between an optimized page and the baseline. Both had the same design and features, and each got about 100,000 clicks a day.

The team moved the rendering of a widget from the browser to the server and rendered the critical HTML there. It also optimized images: it resized the hero image, cleaned up SVGs and PNGs, and delayed images outside the viewport.

Measured on real user sessions, Largest Contentful Paint improved by 31%. Total sales rose 8%, the lead-to-visit rate rose 15% and the cart-to-visit rate rose 11%.

The government wanted one simpler site for public services, built around what people need to get done, instead of separate sites such as Directgov and Business Link.

The Government Digital Service rewrote and redesigned the content instead of copying it. The site runs on open source software, was tested in public so real-user feedback could guide changes, and was planned to take in 24 departments by March 2013.

The two old sites closed on launch day. At launch the government expected the new approach to cost taxpayers up to £70 million a year less than the services it replaced. That is a projection, and the release gives no figure for savings actually achieved.

Growing teams often use one tool for attendance, another for sales and a spreadsheet for stock, so the same customer or employee gets typed into several places.

We built one multi-tenant platform where HR and payroll, sales and CRM, finance, inventory, procurement, projects and eight more modules share the same records. Each company's data is kept separate from every other company's, files are stored privately and opened through short-lived links, and billing runs through Razorpay.

The 5-day trial opens all 14 modules without a card. Payroll is worked out from base salary and attendance, and payslips are created and paid through RazorpayX. Zavik does not calculate PF, ESI or TDS, and we say so up front.

Hiring through a shared inbox loses applications and makes it hard to see who is at which stage.

Jobs live in a database and only active roles are shown. The application form uploads the resume to storage and saves the application. A sign-in protected admin page lets our team manage roles, open each resume through a short-lived link and move applications through the hiring statuses.

The careers pages fall back to a built-in list if the database cannot be reached, so visitors never see an empty error page. Job pages and the sitemap list active roles only.

Most visitors want a rough idea of time, risk or cost before they are ready to talk to anyone.

Each calculator runs in the browser with simple rules. The estimator combines a service track, a project size and a delivery speed into a timeline and a suggested team. The risk score adds up five answers about infrastructure, audits, data and access. The price calculator multiplies users by a fixed rate and adds GST.

The price calculator states that your written quote is the final price. The risk score is a simple scoring guide and not a security audit.

By 2016 the single codebase caused problems. Changing tax calculations could alter shipping rates, tests were slow, and new developers had to learn many unrelated areas before making simple changes.

Starting in early 2017, Shopify reorganized code around real-world concepts such as orders and shipping instead of technical roles. Each component has a public API and owns its data, and an in-house tool called Wedge flags calls that cross component boundaries.

The team could replace a legacy tax engine with a new system, which would have been nearly impossible before the decoupling. Shopify chose a modular monolith to gain modularity without running many separately deployed services.

Segment sent events to over 100 types of destinations, each with its own service and repository. Shared libraries drifted apart, tests were slow, and at one point three full-time engineers spent most of their time keeping the system running.

The team merged the services into one and moved all destination code into one repository. It put about 120 dependencies on a single version. It also built a tool that records HTTP traffic and replays it, so tests no longer depend on live endpoints.

Test runs dropped from up to an hour to milliseconds, and one engineer could deploy the service in minutes. Shared library improvements rose from 32 in the microservice period to 46 in the year after. Segment also named the trade-offs: a crash can affect every destination, and upgrading a shared dependency can break several at once.

The first version used AWS Step Functions and Lambda, with S3 storing video frames between steps. It was quick to build, but it hit a hard scaling limit at about 5% of the expected load and cost too much at large scale.

The team packed all components into one process and passed data through memory instead of S3. The result runs as one long-lived service that scales out on Amazon ECS.

Infrastructure cost fell by more than 90%, and the service could scale further. Commentators pointed out that this was one service, not a move away from microservices across all of Prime Video.

In 2017 Discord stored billions of messages on 12 Cassandra nodes. By early 2022 it stored trillions on 177 nodes. Latency was hard to predict, hot partitions could slow a whole cluster, and maintenance had become costly.

It moved the message store to ScyllaDB. The new cluster needed 72 nodes with 9 TB of disk each, compared with an average of 4 TB per Cassandra node.

The p99 time (the slowest 1% of requests) to fetch historical messages fell from 40 to 125 milliseconds to about 15 milliseconds. The p99 time to insert a message fell from 5 to 70 milliseconds to a steady 5 milliseconds. The cluster shrank from 177 nodes to 72.

NGINX's process-per-worker design spread load unevenly across CPU cores and limited connection reuse, because each worker kept its own pool. Some features, such as retrying a request on a different origin with different headers, were hard to add. The team also wanted to move away from C and Lua.

Cloudflare wrote Pingora in Rust, a memory-safe language, as a new proxy that now handles over 1 trillion requests a day.

With the same traffic, Pingora uses about 70% less CPU and 67% less memory. For one major customer, connection reuse rose from 87.1% to 99.92%. Median time to first byte dropped by 5 milliseconds, and the 95th percentile by 80 milliseconds.

UPI was designed to make payments between bank accounts instant and interoperable, so people are not tied to one bank or one app.

Users link bank accounts to a UPI-enabled app and pay with a UPI ID. The payment request goes through the app's payment service provider to NPCI for verification. Payments can be pushed by the payer or pulled by the payee.

NPCI data reported by IANS shows about 172 billion UPI transactions in 2024, up roughly 46% from about 118 billion in 2023. Their value was nearly ₹247 lakh crore, up about 35% from ₹183 lakh crore. December 2024 alone had about 16.73 billion transactions worth about ₹23.25 lakh crore.

Dropbox stored most of its data on AWS. Storage is the core of its product, so the rented infrastructure was a major cost.

Dropbox ran a project it called Infrastructure Optimization. It moved most data to its own systems in colocation facilities and kept some on AWS, mainly to stay close to users in Europe and parts of the US.

The filing reports $74.6 million in lower operating costs over about two years. In 2016 the AWS bill fell by $92.5 million, and after added costs such as colocation and staffing the net infrastructure saving was $39.5 million. In 2017 infrastructure costs fell by a further $35.1 million. The figure also includes a project that deleted data from long-inactive users.

The company was paying about $3.2 million a year for cloud services.

It bought about $700,000 of Dell servers and ran its own compute. For storage it planned a Pure Storage setup in two data centers, with 18 petabytes of combined capacity, to replace roughly 10 petabytes in AWS S3.

The cloud bill fell to about $1.3 million a year, a saving of almost $2 million a year. The hardware paid for itself in the second half of 2023. The company expects savings of well over $10 million across five years. These are the company's own estimates, from a post by David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals.

People hear that a blockchain cannot be changed quietly, but it is hard to see why until you try to change one.

Each block holds some data, the hash of the block before it and its own hash. The browser computes SHA-256 hashes and mines each block by searching for a nonce that makes the hash start with three zeros. Editing any block marks it, and every block after it, as broken.

Edit a block and watch the checks turn red. Press re-mine to repair the chain and see that every hash changes. Once the chain is valid you can add a block of your own. It is a teaching demo and not a real network.

Smart contracts are easier to trust when you can see the rules working, including what they refuse to do.

A buyer deposits the money, the seller marks the work as delivered, and the buyer releases the payment, or cancels for a refund before delivery. Each step is only allowed for the right person and in the right order.

Try releasing the payment as a stranger, or before delivery, and the contract rejects it and says why. It is a simulation written in JavaScript. A deployed contract enforces the same rules on a blockchain.

Tracing a food item back to its source took about 7 days. In 2018, after the romaine lettuce E. coli outbreak, Walmart announced a new requirement for its suppliers.

Walmart worked with IBM for over a year on IBM Food Trust, which runs on IBM Cloud using Hyperledger Fabric. Suppliers of leafy greens for Walmart and Sam's Club had to upload their data to the blockchain by September 2019 and meet a Global Food Safety Initiative standard. Suppliers only needed to upload data, and IBM provided onboarding.

Walmart reported that tracing the source of a food item dropped from about 7 days to 2.2 seconds.

Customers and the industry want to know where a natural diamond comes from. Tracr records this from the moment a rough diamond is recovered.

De Beers began developing Tracr in 2018 and registers natural rough diamonds at source. In 2023 it opened the platform to the wider industry for rough-to-polish provenance checks. Since January 2025, all newly sourced De Beers rough diamonds of one carat and above are registered.

More than five million rough diamonds are registered, about two thirds of De Beers rough production by value. Under a 2023 initiative, GIA includes Tracr provenance information on eligible diamond grading reports.

Maersk and IBM wanted one shared platform for information exchange across the shipping industry.

They built a working platform and signed up more than 300 members.

On 29 November 2022 Maersk said the platform had not become commercially sustainable as a standalone business. It would go offline by the end of the first quarter of 2023. Maersk's head of business platforms said the company had built a viable platform but had not secured the full, global industry collaboration it needed.

The department wanted tenants to register leases and pay without cheques, printed paperwork or visits to a government office.

With Smart Dubai and other partners, it built a secure database for real estate contracts. The system links to the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, the telecoms system and property-related bills, and tenants can pay electronically.

The department said the whole process would take a few minutes and could be completed online from anywhere. It did not publish numbers for time or money saved, and the claim to be the first government entity to adopt blockchain is its own.

Officials could still change land titles, and the public doubted the integrity of the database. NAPR wanted protection against manipulation from inside and attacks from outside.

BitFury built the system with NAPR, and New America's Blockchain Trust Accelerator gave strategic support. Each land transaction gets a cryptographic hash that is uploaded to the Bitcoin blockchain with a timestamp. The existing registry stays the system of record, and its front end was left unchanged.

The timestamped hash shows that a record has not changed since the transaction was authorized. The system extends to sales, new registrations, mortgages and rentals, demolitions and notary services. The write-up gives no count of titles.

MIT wanted students to own and share their records easily, and to make it simple for others to confirm a degree is genuine without burdening the Registrar's Office.

Students used the Blockcerts Wallet app from Learning Machine, which creates the student's key pair. MIT records a one-way hash of each diploma, with a timestamp, on the Bitcoin blockchain. The diploma contents are not on the chain.

An employer or school can paste a link or upload the diploma file in MIT's credentials portal. The portal finds the blockchain record, checks the keys and confirms the diploma has not changed, immediately and without contacting the Registrar's Office. The pilot covered 111 graduates: 85 from the master of finance program and 26 from media arts and sciences.

Patient records are changed by many people over time. The foundation wanted to be able to show that nobody had altered a record or hidden a change.

Guardtime's KSI blockchain was to be integrated into the Oracle database the foundation uses, to give an independent audit trail for the life of each record.

The partners said this would let the foundation monitor the integrity of its records in near real time and react quickly to incidents. The public announcements do not give measured results or say exactly what is written to the chain.

Customers, partners and government offices need a quick, trustworthy way to check whether an organization is registered and what permits it holds.

The Digital Identity and Trust Program built the public website with BC Registries, which issues organization records as verifiable credentials. The Liquor and Cannabis Regulation Branch issues permit and license credentials against registered organizations. The service uses Hyperledger Aries and Hyperledger Indy, runs on Kubernetes, and the software is open source.

Anyone can check whether an organization is registered, see its business number and registered "doing business as" names, and get notified of changes. Credentials usually update within minutes of a registration change. The latest counts on the page are from June 2021.

MAS wanted to understand whether blockchain and distributed ledger technology could lead to simpler, more efficient alternatives to today's payment and securities systems.

Each phase asked one question. Phase 1 tested tokenized Singapore dollars. Phase 2 built three prototype models for decentralized interbank payments and released the source code as open source. Phase 3 tested simultaneous exchange of tokenized currency and securities with the Singapore Exchange. Phase 4 linked Singapore and Canada for cross-border payments. Phase 5 built a multi-currency payments network prototype with Temasek.

The project produced six reports and concluded in 2020. In May 2019 MAS and the Bank of Canada ran a successful cross-currency experiment, and the final phase took input from more than 40 firms.

Ethereum's original execution chain was secured by miners, while a separate proof-of-stake Beacon Chain had been running alongside it.

The Merge joined the two chains. Afterward, validators who stake ETH secure the network instead of miners.

Energy use fell by roughly 99.95%. Holders and users did not need to do anything, and balances, history and wallets kept working. The Merge did not change fees or network capacity, and blocks arrive about 10% more often.

A traditional exchange needs a company to run an order book and match buyers with sellers. Uniswap asks whether the exchange can run as public rules instead.

Each pool holds reserves of two tokens. After every trade, the product of the two balances must stay the same or grow, and that rule sets the price. Large trades relative to the pool move the price more. Anyone can deposit a pair of tokens into a pool, and swap fees accrue to the people who supplied them. In versions 3 and 4 the rule applies within each provider's chosen price range.

There is no matching engine and no operator. Because the contracts are open source, not upgradeable and permissionless, no company runs the exchange, can pause it or can reverse trades. The documentation does not cover liquidity provider risks such as impermanent loss.

AeroVision required dense 3D cuboid annotations with temporal track IDs, heading angles, and velocity vectors for multi-class obstacles (pedestrians, cyclists, trucks, emergency vehicles) across rainy nighttime test drives. Previous offshore vendors had failed to exceed 92% accuracy, stalling model convergence.

GTS deployed a specialized 40-member computer vision pod trained on custom spatial annotation tools. Each frame was projected across synchronized 2D RGB cameras and 64-channel LiDAR point clouds, passing through a multi-tier human review process before batch export in KITTI format.

The labeled datasets boosted AeroVision's perception model mean Average Precision (mAP) by 14.2%, allowing their self-driving prototype to pass strict automotive OEM safety clearances two weeks ahead of schedule.

Ahead of their Series B funding and nationwide expansion, HealthTech required an exhaustive ethical hacking audit to uncover vulnerabilities across their patient portal, API microservices, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) database configurations without disrupting daily diagnostic telemetry.

The GTS security team performed white-box and black-box penetration tests, identifying three critical business logic vulnerabilities in their token authentication service. Harsh Joshi and senior engineers conducted developer debriefing sessions, delivering code-level remediation diffs and Docker container hardening.

HealthTech remediated 100% of discovered vulnerabilities within 10 days, passed independent HIPAA compliance audits with flying colors, and received GTS's official Security Clearance Certificate.

AuraPay was spending over $4,500/month on generic subscription management software that lacked multi-currency reconciliation and could not handle customized split-settlement logic between Indian banks and overseas partners.

GTS designed and engineered a custom React + Node.js + PostgreSQL platform with role-based access control, automated ledger balancing, and webhook alerts for failed gateway transactions. The delivery included 30 days of round-the-clock post-launch hyper-care.

AuraPay eliminated recurring SaaS license costs, cut accounting reconciliation turnaround from 3 days to under 5 minutes, and achieved 99.99% system uptime during peak festival billing volumes.