A pair of engineers launched Skylight Social with big ambitions but faced a familiar bottleneck: rolling out livestreaming infrastructure meant burning months on custom video transcoding development.

They took a different route. The team tapped into streamplace—an open-source video layer purpose-built for decentralized social platforms. Rather than reinventing the wheel, integrating an existing, battle-tested layer let them ship faster and focus on what makes their social network unique.

This move highlights a growing trend in Web3: leveraging modular, open infrastructure to accelerate development cycles. Why build monolithic stacks when composable tools already exist?