Infura, the Ethereum engineering company, announced on Friday its plans to develop a Decentralized Infrastructure Network to be launched next year. In the statement, the company insists that the new network will give many future users access to Web3 innovations without downtime or outages resulting from a single point of failure.
Continued Reliance on a Few Infrastructure Providers Renders Web3 Further Centralized
Several Web3 firms have contracted Infura to provide them with backend infrastructure to launch their products. Infura provides the firms a way to integrate with blockchains like Ethereum without necessarily running their nodes. Therefore, companies’ dependency on Infura to run their projects has rendered Web3 more centralized.
In the recent past, Infura stated that decentralization could be possible if every firm ran its node. The company now hopes that its Decentralized Infrastructure Network could be the solution to this. In a statement, Infura co-founder, Galano, admits that he does not like the current Web3 dependency on a few infrastructure providers like Infura.
Galano also revealed the company plans to pick a better name for its new network as the title ‘Decentralized Infrastructure Network’ seemed quite long. He added that the company is straightforward when naming its products. For instance, Infura itself is a Japanese word for infrastructure.
Infura CEO Says Decentralization Plans Aren’t Motivated by Merge.
Galano claims that the just concluded Ethereum merge is coincidental timing. He insists that Infura started working on the new network in the past five years. However, because of the company’s daily operations to serve MetaMask wallet users and the developers building on Infura, the research for the network has not been consistent.
Infura operates under ConsenSys, an Ethereum software firm headed by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. One of Lubin’s statements read that decentralization is prioritized at ConsenSys, and he expects Infura’s new network to be the first step towards achieving its aim.
ConsenSys also runs a crypto wallet known as MetaMask. Recently the company launched several crypto products, including ConsenSys NFT, CodeFi, Quorum, and Diligence. With a traditional corporate top-down structure and the numerous Web3 products under its control, ConsenSys seems less decentralized than it should be.