The current Amazon Net Companies (AWS) outage that knocked out main crypto and fintech platforms, together with Coinbase, Robinhood, MetaMask and Venmo, has reignited debate over how decentralized Web3 actually is.
Whereas blockchains continued producing blocks uninterrupted, tens of millions of customers have been unable to entry wallets, exchanges and decentralized applications (DApps) as a result of their interfaces and application programming interfaces (APIs) have been hosted on centralized servers.
“Decentralization has succeeded on the ledger layer however not but on the infrastructure layer,” Jamie Elkaleh, chief advertising and marketing officer at Bitget Pockets, advised Cointelegraph. “Actual resilience depends upon diversifying past hyperscalers into community-driven and distributed networks.”
Elkaleh added that full decentralization “isn’t but possible at scale” as a result of most groups depend on hyperscalers like AWS, Google Cloud and Azure for compliance, pace and uptime. The sensible purpose, he stated, must be “credible multi-home” infrastructure, distributing workloads throughout each cloud and decentralized networks to keep away from single factors of failure.
Elkaleh argued that cloud suppliers supply scalability and safety, however at the price of focus threat. “If one area or supplier goes down, lots of of apps are affected,” he stated. Hybrid techniques, mixing cloud with decentralized storage and community-run nodes, are the subsequent logical step.
Associated: Amazon AWS Outage Hits Coinbase Mobile App, Robinhood
Customers have been locked out of working blockchains
Anthurine Xiang, co-founder of EthStorage and QuarkChain, stated the outage proved that “even in Web3, many companies nonetheless rely closely on centralized infrastructure.”
She defined that true decentralization requires redesigning each layer, from storage to entry, in order that no single supplier can take techniques offline. “It’s like the home is okay, however the door is jammed,” Xiang stated, describing how customers have been locked out of working blockchains.
The outage started on Monday and lasted for roughly 15 hours. The outage triggered Coinbase’s app and Base network to crash, stopping customers from logging in or making transactions, whereas Robinhood merchants reported delays and API failures.
The outage additionally affected MetaMask, with customers reporting that they noticed zero balances of their wallets. “Their property have been secure, however the service chargeable for retrieving stability information had gone offline,” Xiang defined, noting it wasn’t a technical failure of the blockchain itself.
In the meantime, Jawad Ashraf, CEO of Vanar Blockchain, criticized the crypto trade for all “working on the identical servers.” He claimed that roughly 70% of Ethereum nodes are hosted by AWS, Google, or Microsoft. “We’re simply paying three totally different landlords as a substitute of 1,” he stated.
Constructing totally decentralized techniques is feasible, he added, however “most groups received’t do it anytime quickly” as a result of it’s slower and extra advanced than spinning up on AWS.
A wake-up name
Elkaleh stated the outage ought to speed up funding in decentralized cloud, storage and compute networks equivalent to Akash, Filecoin, Arweave and others. He known as for Web3 builders to embrace hybrid fashions that blend conventional reliability with distributed redundancy.
“Each main outage is a wake-up name,” he stated. “The way forward for Web3 received’t be outlined by how decentralized the tokens are, however by how distributed the infrastructure really turns into.”
Journal: Back to Ethereum — How Synthetix, Ronin and Celo saw the light
