How Universal Delivers 24/7 Crypto Asset Tracking on Railway

For a DeFi infrastructure startup wrapping millions in crypto assets across five blockchains, every minute of downtime matters. Universal (built by Alongside Finance) enables users to seamlessly move assets like XRP from their native chains to any EVM-compatible network, processing over 1,000 requests per minute for platforms including World App.

As Universal's two-person backend team—engineers Jakub Swierczek and CTO Jun Hong—scaled their infrastructure on Vercel, costs spiraled while architectural limitations threatened their ability to serve 24/7 crypto markets.

"We were paying for Vercel's Pro plan to support three environments. With bots hitting our endpoints every two seconds and baseline traffic exceeding 1,000 requests per minute, serverless function costs added up quickly."

The serverless model fundamentally mismatched Universal's needs. They run five identical blockchain monitoring services—same code, different chains—across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and Polygon.

"We have five services, each one for each chain, but basically it's the same code. It's the same repository, the same branch. Vercel wasn't built for this deployment pattern."

Security requirements created the final barrier. Universal's custodian, Coinbase Custody, requires strict IP whitelisting—only traffic from approved static addresses can interact with systems controlling millions in crypto assets. On Vercel, static IPs were either impossible or prohibitively expensive.

Universal discovered Railway offered the perfect balance: PaaS simplicity with real infrastructure power. The migration from Vercel was remarkably straightforward.

"Basically we just pointed to a repository on GitHub and it was working. We're using Cloudflare for our domain, so it was pretty easy to move."

Railway transformed how Universal deploys their sophisticated infrastructure. They run three complete environments (dev, staging, production), each containing 2 self-hosted Supabase instances, 1 PostgreSQL database, 4 API services, 5 blockchain monitors, and multiple background workers—all managed by just two engineers.

The platform's variable referencing system eliminates manual configuration. Universal references ${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}} directly between services, with automatic propagation across environments.

"I really like the connection between services and that I can reference variables from another service. It's really helpful."

Railway's static outbound IPs solved Universal's custodian integration challenge, while private networking features enabled elegant security solutions. They built a Golang proxy connecting Railway's *.railway.internal domains to Tailscale VPN, allowing secure database access without public exposure.

"It's an advantage over Fly.io—we can set up static outbound IPs for the service, so it's easy to set up policies on custodian systems to only accept traffic from that IP."

The platform's rapid environment creation proved transformative. Universal needed a third environment beyond staging and production for testing against real production assets—critical for financial infrastructure.

"On Railway, it's 10-15 minutes of manual work. On the cloud, like big cloud infrastructure with networking stuff and permissions, I think half a day."

Railway's impact on Universal was immediate and measurable, transforming both their bottom line and their development velocity.

Infrastructure costs dropped 70% compared to Vercel while actually improving performance. The dramatic reduction came from moving away from expensive serverless function invocations to persistent services that handle 1,000+ requests per minute without surprise bills.

Deployment speed increased 20x. What took half a day on traditional cloud infrastructure now takes 15 minutes on Railway. Environment creation that required extensive configuration now happens with clicks.

The platform now handles 100+ wrapped assets with $100M+ total value locked, processing 1,000+ requests per minute during peak bot traffic. This scale was tested when World App listed Universal's assets.

"When we were listed on World App—they listed a lot of our assets—we needed to go fast. I really enjoyed the scaling. Adding instances for services is very easy—it's basically one click."

Both backend engineers can focus entirely on product development rather than infrastructure management. Security compliance was achieved without complexity—Railway's static IPs enabled Coinbase Custody integration while private networking eliminated public database exposure.

"If I can deploy on Railway, I deploy it on Railway. We don't need to spend our time dealing with infrastructure. Having everything in one place, having network settings... it's really easy."

Looking forward, Universal sees Railway as their permanent infrastructure solution. For a company securing millions in wrapped crypto assets across five blockchains, Railway eliminated the false choice between simplicity and power; delivering enterprise-grade infrastructure that costs 70% less while enabling two engineers to move 20x faster.