It's time to officially face the "centralization" problem brought by Infura

Author: Rhythm BlockBeats

On March 4, some users expressed themselves on social media The MetaMask wallet cannot be used in Venezuela, and the cause was found to be a problem with the API service provider Infura.

Infura responded that some settings were misconfigured when changing certain configurations to comply with new sanctions directives from the United States and other jurisdictions, resulting in service failures in some regions interruption. MetaMask, which is the home of Infura and uses Infura services, also had problems due to this error. As a result, users in some regions cannot access MetaMask for a short time.

This is the Nth time Infura has a problem that has affected the Ethereum ecosystem. Although this issue has been discussed many years ago, some issues should be re-emerged in the face of Ethereum's super ecology that cannot be compared in the same breath. Especially during the period of turmoil, because of the problems between countries, the Web3.0 world, which is advertised as "decentralized", has begun to have barriers to entry, which is really shameful.

We are not denying the important value of Infura, but if we can try to alleviate this problem in other ways?

What is Infura?

Professional speaking, Infura is an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) product, the purpose of which is to lower the threshold for accessing Ethereum data. In layman's terms, Infura is a platform that allows your DApp to quickly access Ethereum without running an Ethereum node locally.

From a programmer's point of view, Infura is a Web3 provider behind which is a load-balanced API node cluster.

To understand more simply, Infura is a public Ethereum node, which can see all the data on the entire Ethereum chain. The advantage of this node is that Infura is an external service. In fact, project parties or trading platforms can deploy nodes by themselves. The functions realized are exactly the same as Infura, but it is very troublesome and expensive. So there is a market for Infura's services.

Across the Ethereum network, there is a need for a utility that lowers the barrier to entry and simplifies access to Ethereum data. Foremost among these are infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings, and leading the way in this regard is Infura, which provides developers, DApp teams, and enterprises across industries with a set of tools to connect their applications to Ethereum network and other decentralized platforms.

Infura is the Ethereum infrastructure developed by developer Michael Wuehler and was originally operated independently. It was wholly acquired by ConsenSys in 2019 and became its business unit. At launch, Infura is free to use. Subscriptions followed, with fees ranging from $50 to $1,000 per month. However, for developers or projects with small needs, Infura is still very friendly. Developers can create 3 projects in Infura for free and submit 100,000 requests per day using Infura's API service.

What is Infura good for?

Infura Chief Systems Engineer Nicola Cocchiaro said: "Our mission is to facilitate access to Ethereum and the opportunities it provides." They have indeed achieved this mission, Far exceeded expectations.

Many well-known projects on Ethereum (MetaMask, Aragon, Gnosis, OpenZeppelin, etc.) utilize Infura's API to connect their applications to the Ethereum network. As the largest API provider in the Ethereum ecosystem, the existence of Infura does make it much easier for developers.

The most well-known part of Infura's infrastructure is the hosted Ethereum client network, supporting main net and testnet. Ethereum nodes are only part of the Infura stack, and they also have IPFS services, but the ecology is very different from Ethereum, and the attention is naturally not so great.

Projects and companies using Infura

On Infura's official website, Rhythm found that many well-known companies and projects have used Infura services. For example, the Ethereum light wallet MetaMask uses Infura's zero-client approach to connect to Infura's remote infrastructure to serve more than millions of users. (Rhythm note: In addition to using the Infura service, MetaMask also runs its own node)

For projects like Enigma, who value scalability more, Infura will work with developers across the ecosystem to keep the network stable run.

Of course, there are many trading platforms that also use Infura’s services, such as Upbit, Bithumb, etc. There are also some decentralized protocols, such as 0x and MyCrypto, which rely on Infura to broadcast transaction data and smart contracts to the Ethereum mainnet.

Some customer cases listed on Infura official website

Concerns about being too dependent on Infura

Current Ethereum full network node 6300, Infura once stated in 2018 that the number of nodes connected to the Ethereum network through Infura accounted for 5-10% of the total number of nodes. This ratio will only increase now as the cost of maintaining a node becomes greater.

This is not the first time Infura has had problems. In November 2020, Infura was not running the latest version of the Geth client, and some special transactions triggered a bug in this version of the client. Infura is down.

This is considered to be the most serious Ethereum accident after The DAO. It can be considered that the Ethereum network is temporarily paralyzed: mainstream trading platforms cannot deposit and withdraw ERC-20 Tokens, MetaMask cannot be used, and so on.

There are also minor problems. In February of this year, platforms such as OpenSea and Uniswap had problems again. The reason was that Infura’s traffic surged and went down. Infura has apparently become the foundation of the $320 billion mansion.

As early as 2018, developers have expressed concerns about Infura. Afri Schoedon, an ethereum developer at Parity Technologies, said the ethereum network cannot rely on Infura to handle 10 billion requests per day. Schoedon believes that over-reliance on Infura will increase the centralization of the protocol.

In addition to the project party or users building their own nodes, we have many other projects to choose from, such as Alchemy, or the very popular Pocket Network, etc. While the impact of Infura's glitches won't go away completely, it can at least be reduced.

We are not denying the value of Infura, Infura is very important to Ethereum, but if there are more node incentive schemes, or solutions to reduce node operating costs With the emergence of methods, Ethereum will be more perfect, even better than ETH2.0.

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