Onchain Transaction Reliability, Solved

As blockchain becomes more central to finance, reliable onchain transactions are now highly critical. An onchain transaction isn’t just a message, it’s a promise. When a user signs and sends a transaction, they expect a result: a transfer to go through, a position to update, a contract to execute. That promise sets off a chain of expectations, both for users and for systems around them. When that promise is broken—when a transaction fails—it doesn’t just cause a delay. It breaks user flows, interrupts automation, and erodes trust. For platforms processing thousands of transfers per day, such as payment providers, trading firms, or bridge protocols, even a one percent failure rate means hundreds of issues daily.

Over the past year, we set out to rebuild our transaction delivery stack from the ground up. We combined strong infrastructure, smart retry mechanisms, and developer-friendly reliability tools. The result is that our clients such as Bridge, now part of Stripe, Iron, now part of MoonPay, and circa 10% of the stablecoin payments industry run on Dfns with failure rates close to zero across Solana, Ethereum, Base, Tron, Polygon, and other major blockchains. This is the story of what we built and why it works.

Why transaction reliability is hard (and important)

At first glance, sending a blockchain transaction seems easy. A user signs a payload, it gets broadcasted to the network, and eventually it gets confirmed. But in practice, making sure this process works every time, at scale, is anything but simple. 

Every blockchain behaves differently. Some prioritize speed and offer near-instant finality, but come with volatile gas fees that spike without warning. Others keep costs low but introduce complex signing procedures or require extra steps before a transaction is considered valid. That variability makes it hard to build a universal transaction engine.

Then come the infrastructure challenges. Blockchain transactions can only get executed through nodes (whether your own or from third-party providers) whose only job is to register the event into the state of the entire chain. But these nodes can be unreliable. Sometimes they are slow to respond. Sometimes they drop requests. Sometimes they give conflicting data about the same transaction. RPC endpoints might say a transaction was submitted, but it never reaches the mempool. Or worse, it gets stuck in limbo, neither confirmed nor failed, leaving developers unsure whether to retry or wait. This uncertainty becomes even more painful at scale. When you are running a wallet platform, payment system, or trading engine that sends thousands of transactions per day across chains like Ethereum, Solana, or Polygon, every gap in reliability can turn into an operational nightmare. Support tickets pile up, automated workflows fail, funds go temporarily missing, traders miss positions, and users lose trust.

Reliable transactions are not just about moving money; they are about trust in the system. They ensure that every operation, whether sending ten dollars or ten million in stablecoins, is submitted, confirmed, and tracked with clarity. That level of reliability is what separates a hobby project from production-grade infrastructure. This is the core challenge we’ve focused on at Dfns: how to make blockchain transactions behave with the same consistency and predictability people expect from traditional finance. Solving it means going beyond simply broadcasting a transaction, it means building for financial resilience, recovery, and confidence at every step.

The Dfns recipe to ensuring transaction reliability

(1) From delegating to owning the blockchain node layer

One of the most impactful changes we made was taking control of our blockchain node infrastructure. We now operate our own dedicated blockchain nodes across the major networks we support. This gives us three key advantages.

• First, security. By hosting our own nodes, we eliminate dependencies on third-party providers that can introduce blind spots, errors, or even manipulated data. We continuously cross-validate our node data with external endpoints, ensuring that discrepancies are caught immediately.
• Second, observability. With full access to node logs, mempools, and transaction queues, we can investigate failures in real time. We no longer have to rely on opaque external RPC services or slow vendor support. If a transaction fails, we know why—and we can fix it in record time.
• Third, redundancy. Our infrastructure is designed to reroute requests automatically if a node is slow or temporarily unreachable. Whether the issue is load, connectivity, or sync lag, traffic is seamlessly redirected to a healthy node, ensuring uninterrupted service.

(2) Automatic failure recovery with reindexing and rebroadcasting

Despite best efforts, even the most carefully crafted transactions can get stuck or lost in the network. That’s why we built automated systems for transaction reindexing and rebroadcasting. When a transaction is submitted, our backend continuously monitors its status. If a transaction fails to confirm within a given window, the system triggers a reindexing flow. This involves rescanning the blockchain for that transaction, comparing block data, and checking for matches based on hash, payload, and expected signature.

If the transaction is confirmed, we update our internal records accordingly. If not, we rebroadcast it programmatically and without developer intervention. Our infrastructure handles signature reordering (for chains like Solana), fee recalculations, and signature reconstruction as needed. This is especially crucial during periods of high congestion, such as we saw with Solana during the TRUMP token surge earlier this year. These flows have helped clients like Bridge reduce manual recovery work dramatically. Transactions that would have once required support tickets or replays now complete automatically in the background—keeping money flowing and customers happy.

(3) Eliminating accidental double-spending and duplicate transfers

Even if the blockchain protects against double-spending at the protocol level, many issues originate offchain where most systems still fall short. Network hiccups, retries from mobile clients, and misunderstood error codes can cause users to unknowingly resubmit the same transaction multiple times. Without proper safeguards, this can result in multiple transactions being initiated, leading to confusion or even double charges. 

To address this, Dfns introduced API-level idempotency. Developers can assign a unique externalId to each transaction request. When a request is received, our system checks if this ID has already been seen:

• If it has, and the payload is identical, we return the original response.
• If it has, but the payload differs, we return a 409 Conflict—preventing accidental duplicates.
• If it’s new, we store the ID and process the transaction normally.

We support both transient storage (using fast-access memory like Redis) and permanent storage (via databases like DynamoDB), allowing developers to choose between speed and retention based on their needs. This simple feature has had a massive impact—especially for high-volume or latency-sensitive applications like Iron, where retries are common and safety is paramount. By offloading retry handling to Dfns, developers can simplify their logic, reduce edge cases, and ensure consistent behavior across all chains.

(4) Performance optimization at the infrastructure layer

Transaction reliability isn't just about preventing failures—it’s about doing so at scale.

Our infrastructure has been tuned to process thousands of requests per second, across dozens of chains, without slowing down. We do this through:

• Parallel processing which allows us to handle high transaction volume without queue buildup.
• Smart queuing where high-priority transactions are surfaced and processed ahead of less critical ones.
• Advanced load balancing, which distributes requests intelligently across servers and nodes to avoid overloads.
• Caching, to prevent redundant lookups and speed up access to frequently used transaction data.

These improvements have shaved milliseconds off transaction pipelines and allowed clients to scale aggressively without running into bottlenecks.

Takeaways for developers tempted to build in-house

The best validation of any system is how it performs in the wild. And over the past year, we’ve seen real-world impact across some of our most demanding partners. Before adopting Dfns’ full reliability stack, clients like Bridge and Iron were seeing transaction failure rates close to 10% due to a mix of network congestion, inconsistent node data, RPC errors and UI-centric, legacy vendors that were not focused on solving these core issues. Since implementing node redundancy, API idempotency, reindexing, rebroadcasting, and data consistency features, that number has dropped to nearly zero. This improvement isn’t just a technical win, it’s a business enabler. Faster settlements, fewer errors, and reduced support tickets have allowed these teams to scale faster, maintain SLAs, and offer a better user experience. If you’re building in crypto, reliability should be non-negotiable. With Dfns, you get infrastructure that’s designed for:

• Resilience: Near-zero failure rates, even across high-volume workloads.
• Recoverability: Automatic reindexing and rebroadcasting to ensure transactions don’t get lost.
• Safety: Idempotency handling that prevents user-side errors from becoming financial mistakes.
• Visibility: Real-time tracking and monitoring of transaction status, retries, and node performance.

These systems are deeply integrated into our Wallet-as-a-Service platform, so you can get started with minimal setup—no need for external relayers, custom smart contracts, or complex monitoring stacks.

Transaction reliability on blockchains is a hard problem. We’ve seen first-hand how even small inconsistencies can lead to failed payments, frustrated users, and operational chaos. That’s why we’ve made it our mission to reduce that uncertainty to the lowest odds possible. By bringing node infrastructure in-house, building resilient retry systems, implementing offchain idempotency, and tuning our backend for performance, Dfns now powers onchain transactions with the kind of reliability that institutions demand. We’re proud of what we’ve built together with our clients and deeply grateful for their trust and support.

Try Dfns today or get in touch for early access to upcoming features.