The Potential Of Infura On Ethereum

The Potential Of Infura On Ethereum

The release manager for the Parity Ethereum client, Afri Schodeon went to Twitter in October to share his thoughts on Ethereum most popular, yet controversial, technologies, Infura saying, “if we don’t stop relying on Infura, the vision of ethereum failed.”

Infura deals with over 12 billion code requests on a daily basis and provides a way for develops to connect to Ethereum without having to run a full node. Even though the statistics aren’t publicly shared, by creating an easier method for interfacing with the network, it is said to underpin the majority of decentralised application in the ecosystem of Ethereum.

Although, Infura is operated by just one provider which is the Ethereum development studio ConsenSys and relies on cloud servers hosted by Amazon. With this, concerns exist that the service represents at a single point of failure for the whole Ethereum network.

The co-founder of Infura, Michael Wuehler was quoted in an interview saying:

“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.”

Many of the projects see the importance of Infuras contribution to Ethereum in “referring to the service as a pillar that holds up the developer community today” while many like Schoedon feel that steps need to be taken in order to seek a decentralised alternative.

In another tweet, Schoedon said, “there is no point in having dApps connecting through Metamask to a blockchain hosted by someone else.”

Schoedon isn’t the only one who has this thought process. Instead, there is a host of new efforts to get rid of Infura as the go-to the connection point for developers linking their decentralised application to Ethereum.

A communications officer for a node incentivisation scheme, dAppnode, Yalor Mewn spoke to CoinDesk on the matter saying:

“One of the issues that we’re facing in the space today is that decentralized application development is happening through centralized services. We are building all of this infrastructure on top of a bottleneck.”

According to data, there are over 11,800 Ethereum full nodes. The co-founder of Infura said that the platform accounts for up to ten percent of the nodes but because the Infura nodes are highly reliable, under 24-hour maintenance, which accounts for a excessive volume of traffic.

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