The last six months have revealed a critical challenge in cloud infrastructure: centralization. Leading providers of internet infrastructure have become significant points of failure. Recent disruptions from AWS and Cloudflare, caused by routine operational mistakes rather than attacks, have impacted numerous platforms globally, stalling services and transactions.
Impact of Centralization
Yair Cleper, co-founder of Magma Devs and contributor to Lava Network, emphasizes the risks posed by centralized systems. He notes, “Too much of the internet runs through too few chokepoints.” As a result, issues like an AWS update can freeze transactions across various platforms, affecting users’ ability to interact with healthy blockchains.
Cost of Downtime
- Mid-to-large enterprises experience downtime costs from several hundred thousand to millions of dollars per hour.
- Cascading failures also affect critical systems like authentication and payments.
Crypto infrastructure, heavily reliant on centralized resources, has been particularly vulnerable to such outages. The events during AWS’s October disruptions exemplify this, affecting services like Coinbase and Robinhood without blockchain failures—only the access layers were crippled.
The Future of Infrastructure: AI and Centralization
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global data center electricity consumption is projected to double by 2030, primarily due to AI workloads. This increase demands continuous requests and places substantial pressure on cloud services. Cleper highlights the consequences: “Agents don’t sleep, and they need clean, verifiable data.”
Decentralized RPC: A Solution for Reliability
Decentralized Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) offer an innovative solution by routing requests across multiple independent providers. This technology allows real-time performance monitoring and rerouting of traffic away from unhealthy paths. For instance, if AWS or Cloudflare were to experience a disruption, platforms utilizing decentralized RPC could continue operating smoothly.
Advantages of Decentralization
- Failure isolation reduces platform-wide outages.
- Requests are distributed, ensuring that issues remain localized.
- Verifiable diversity across independent sources strengthens trust and reliability.
By providing a verifiable audit trail, decentralized RPCs can enhance accountability during outages. This capability is particularly crucial for financial institutions that require compliance and reliability during disruptions.
Limitations of Decentralized RPC
While decentralized RPC can mitigate the risks of a single-provider outage, it is not a panacea. According to Cleper, it cannot rectify issues such as broken blockchains or smart contract flaws. Nonetheless, it significantly lessens the consequences of infrastructure failure.
The Road Ahead: Hybrid Approaches
Looking to the future, the industry must embrace a hybrid model that incorporates both cloud and decentralized routing. Cleper believes that the solution lies in utilizing multiple clouds and specialized providers to create a resilient internet infrastructure.
As the industry moves toward 2026, diversifying access layers becomes crucial. Lessons learned must prompt immediate action to prevent another significant infrastructure collapse. By adopting decentralized RPC methodologies, the internet can shift towards a future with more reliable connectivity and less vulnerability.
