Infura Outage Initiated Debate Over Ethereum’s Decentralization

The infura outage, sparked a new debate over Ethereum’s decentralization after the key service provider went down and led to numerous issues for the network. The incident raised questions among the crypto community in Ethereum’s degree of decentralization as we find out more in today’s ETH news.

Infura is the key infrastructure for the Ethereum network but the Infura outage caused many problems for users on Binance, Metamask and other popular apps. Some even suggested that the issue highlighted an overreliance on Consensys-backed projects. Running a full ETH node is one main solution for supporters of the blockchain to achieve true decentralization. The outage outlined some of the most widely discussed flaws, reigniting discussions about the true meaning of decentralization. Infura is one of the main principal infrastructure providers which means it contributes full nods to the network which exchanges and other apps run on.

Older geth-versions contained consensus-flaw(s) which were hit today on mainnet. The "change introduced" was actually fixing those issue(s). This is a reminder to keep your node(s) up to date! https://t.co/oZatRUgENS

— M H (((Swende))) (@mhswende) November 11, 2020

While it’s undoubtedly convenient for these apps to use Infura rather than to run their own node, it’s hard to escape the fact that they are relying on another party. The service is backed by ConsenSys the blockchain software company run by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. The problems arose due to the bug in Geth which is an ETH client. The ETH core developers fixed the bug but the change caused anyone running an older version of Geth to split into the minority forks. As a result, some apps failed to show data.

Transactions failed so exchanges like Binance decided to stop all ETH and ERC20 transactions. The foundation security lead Martin Swende explained all on Twitter. The issue was resolved but it did spark a debate over Ethereum’s level of decentralization. Some raised questions over why the bug went unannounced before today arguing that the decision shows that a small minority guards the protocol. The ETH developer Peter Szilagyi defended the action and stated that the announcement could have risked more disruption. Others blame Infura for using an older GETH client which caused a few other apps to fail. Among other things, the issue only outlines that having multiple clients can be beneficial.

(2/2)… got stuck on a minority chain (~30 blocks in 2 hours)

3. Technically, that was an unannounced hard fork. Something similar happened to #Bitcoin 7 years ago when there was a database upgrade: https://t.co/bdqQdpxIj2

4. Fix: upgrade geth and run debug.setHead(11234872) pic.twitter.com/SVQtgijViW

— Nikita Zhavoronkov (@nikzh) November 11, 2020

After the incident, many ETH users looked for alternative service providers like Alchemy, Quiknode, and Pocket Network. other providers like AVADO also offered a unique alternative as Bernd Lapp the co-founder said:

 “AVADO created a service called RYO Cloud (Run Your Own Cloud), which is a package that AVADO owners can activate on their box. The package gives you the option to add certain applications you are running on your box, to the Cloud and therefore let other users use them. Users that do not have an AVADO can use the specific RPC endpoints. We know of a few applications that are already using this endpoint like Rotki, in addition to Infura.”