Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain, said decentralizing applications (DApps) could mitigate outages in internet infrastructure, such as when internet service provider Cloudflare experienced a massive outage in November.
In Thursday’s post, X Buterin he said Etherum had to do more to achieve its mission[building] a world computer that serves as the central infrastructure element of a more free and open Internet.” According to the co-founder, this started with DApps that “work without fraud, censorship, or third-party interference” and can be used at scale on the blockchain.
“Applications that the user won’t even notice if Cloudflare goes down, or even if all of Cloudflare is hacked by North Korea,” Buterin said. “Apps whose stability transcends the ups and downs of companies, ideologies and political parties. And apps that protect your privacy. All this – for finance, but also for identity, governance and any other civilizational infrastructure that people want to build.”
The Cloudflare outage, which took down about 20% of the platform’s pages in November, was caused by a software failure. According to the autopsy report from the company, the “feature file” used by its bot management system in response to cyberattacks has exceeded its normal limit.
Related: Cloudflare’s failure shows why cryptocurrencies require comprehensive decentralization
As many cryptocurrency platforms suffered the same outage as well as the one caused by Amazon Web Services in October, many questioned the reliability of centralized internet infrastructure. Websites including Coinbase, Blockchain.com, BitMEX and Ledger have gone down.
“Decentralization is being eroded not by capture, but by convenience,” said Buterin and Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner in a manifesto published on November 11. “It drifts – automatically, constantly – towards trust dependence.”
Buterin presents the idea of gas futures on the Ethereum network
The Ethereum co-founder regularly appears on social media, offering insight into the cryptocurrency industry and technology through his blog and other media. In early December, he argued that the cryptocurrency market needs a “good, trustless onchain gas futures market” that gives users confidence in blockchain transaction fees.
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