SHARE

In October, Afri Schodeon, the Release Manager for the Parity Ethereum Client lamented on Twitter about Ethereum community’s overreliance on Infura. Turns out the release manager is not alone in the opinion as a number of members of the community have come forward to express their worries about the overdependence of Infura.

Infura has been Pivotal

No one is questioning Infura’s contribution to the success of Ethereum, however, the major concern here is how a purported decentralized system is ironically built in the most centralized network possible.

Infura which is believed to host billions of request codes by developers seeking to connect to the Ethereum network without having to go through the hassle of running a full code is operated centrally.

Infura’s Centralization Question

Infura operated centrally by the ethereum development studio ConsenSys. The operator is a client of Amazon’s cloud services where Infura’s data is store. The problem with this kind of operation is that when the operator goes down, infura goes down as so is Ethereum. Also when Amazon decides to withdraw their cloud services unceremoniously Ethereum’s Centralizing will be derailed.

Michael Wuehler, the co-founder of Infura confirms these worries in his statement that;

“If every single dApp in the world is pointed to Infura, and we decided to turn that off, then we could, and the dApps would stop working. That’s the concern and that’s a valid concern.”

Stakeholders are lobbying for the development of an Infura-like system but one that is decentralized in order to protect Ethereum’s integrity. A number of ideas that can replace Infura have been tossed around only that none has been acted upon.

Proposed solutions

Parity Technologies is among the firms that have come up with proposed alternatives for Infura. The company has unveiled LightJS- a new code library that solves the shortcomings of Infura. With the new release the company seeks to inspire developers to create light clients that will replace the infamous Infura.

Turbo Geth project also seeks to find an alternative to Infura together with Dappnode, D-node, and VIP node that encourages developers to run full nodes to avoid using Infura. These are just but a few proposed long term solutions to the Infura issue.

SHARE
Previous articleG-20 Leaders Reaffirms Their Pledge to Regulate Cryptocurrencies
Next articleMorgan Creek Places A $1million Bet In The Hope Crypto Beats S&P
Steve Kanaval: Portfolio Manager/Writer/ Market Analyst Steve began his career in the Trading Pits in Chicago making markets at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (NYSE:CME) the Chicago Board of Trade and the CBOE in the early 80’s. He ran the Morgan Stanley Derivative Prop Trading for the firm specializing in Index Arbitrage. He continued his career as a Trader/Portfolio Manager for multiple Hedge Funds during the Internet Boom of the 90’s managing large portfolios. Steve is known as an expert in MicroCap Technology Stocks and the emerging Digital Currency markets as a Portfolio Manager for his Family Office. Steve has managed portfolio’s in volatile asset classes for 3 decades as a commodity trader, hedge fund manager and digital currency trader and miner. Steve publishes his views on the asset classes in a public forum and has published more than 10,000 articles simplifying these complex and volatile assets for readers. His work is published on multiple sites including Bloomberg, Equities.com, Hacked.com, CryptoCurrencyNews as a paid contributor. His work includes research, journalism and archived video on important market volatility related to stocks, digital currency and other volatile misunderstood asset classes. He offers a humorous, unique insight and the related back stories and drivers for readers interested in volatility and emerging market assets. Full disclosure Steve is long 25 digital currencies and sits on the board of multiple public companies involved in digital currencies, and owns shares in these companies from time to time.