The centralization issue of Ethereum infrastructure Infura has once again caused controversy. What alternatives do we have?

It’s time to confront Infura’s centralization problem and find a solution.

Written by: BlockBeats

Editor's note: On November 24, Ethereum infrastructure development company ConsenSys (MetaMask and Infura development entity) updated its privacy policy on its official website on November 23, stating that MetaMask will collect user information when the default RPC is Infura. This policy update has triggered a strong response from the market, and the issue of Infura's over-centralization has once again been put on the table. This article is a collection of two articles written by BlockRhythm on March 4 this year, "It's time to officially face the "centralization" problem brought by Infura" and "In addition to Infura, what other API projects are available?" The former article explains the centralization problems and risks currently faced by Infura, an important infrastructure, and the latter article lists 5 Infura alternatives.

On March 4, a user said on social media that he was unable to use the MetaMask wallet in Venezuela. After finding out the reason, it was discovered that there was a problem with the API service provider Infura.

Infura responded that when changing certain configurations to comply with new sanctions from the United States and other jurisdictions, some settings were misconfigured, resulting in service interruptions in some regions. MetaMask, which is Infura's parent company and uses Infura services, also had problems due to this error, causing users in some regions to be unable to access MetaMask for a short period of time.

This is the Nth time that Infura has had problems that have affected the Ethereum ecosystem. Although this issue has been discussed many years ago, now facing the super ecosystem of Ethereum, some issues should be re-focused. Especially during the turbulent period, because of the problems between countries, the Web3.0 world, which is touted as "decentralized", has also begun to have entry barriers, which is really embarrassing.

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

What is Infura?

To put it more professionally, Infura is an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) product that aims to lower the threshold for accessing Ethereum data. To put it more simply, Infura is a platform that allows your DApp to quickly access Ethereum without having to run an Ethereum node locally.

From a programmer's perspective, Infura is a Web3 provider with a load-balanced API node cluster behind it.

To put it more simply, Infura is a public Ethereum node that can see all the data on the entire Ethereum chain. The advantage of this node is that Infura is an external service. Project owners or trading platforms can actually deploy nodes on their own and achieve the same functions as Infura, but it is very troublesome and costly. Therefore, Infura's services have a market.

Throughout the Ethereum network, there is a need for a utility that lowers the barrier to entry and simplifies access to Ethereum data. The most important of these are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products, and the leading one in this regard is Infura, which provides a set of tools for developers, DApp teams, and enterprises across industries to connect their applications to the Ethereum network and other decentralized platforms.

Infura is an Ethereum infrastructure developed by developer Michael Wuehler. It was initially operated independently. In 2019, it was wholly acquired by ConsenSys and became its business unit. Infura was free to use when it was first launched. Subscription services were subsequently launched, with fees ranging from $50 to $1,000 per month. However, for developers or projects with smaller 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 used for?

“Our mission is to facilitate access to Ethereum and the opportunities it provides,” said Nicola Cocchiaro, lead systems engineer at Infura. And they have certainly accomplished that mission, far exceeding expectations.

Many well-known Ethereum projects (MetaMask, Aragon, Gnosis, OpenZeppelin, etc.) use Infura's API to connect their applications to the Ethereum network. As the largest API provider in the Ethereum ecosystem, the existence of Infura has indeed made it much more convenient for developers.

The most famous part of Infura's infrastructure is the hosted Ethereum client network, which supports the mainnet and testnet over HTTPS and WSS through client-compatible JSON-RPC. Ethereum nodes are only part of the Infura stack, and they also have IPFS services, but the ecosystem is very different from Ethereum, so it is naturally not as popular.

Projects and companies using Infura

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

For projects like CryptoChain that place greater emphasis on scalability, Infura works with developers across the ecosystem to keep the network running smoothly.

Of course, many trading platforms 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's official website

Concerns about over-reliance on Infura

Currently, there are 6,300 nodes in the Ethereum network. Infura once stated in 2018 that the number of nodes connected to the Ethereum network through Infura accounts for 5-10% of the total number of nodes. As the cost of maintaining nodes increases, this proportion will only increase now.

This is not the first time that Infura has had problems. In November 2020, Infura did not run the latest version of the Geth client, and some special transactions triggered a bug in this version of the client, and Infura then crashed.

This is considered the most serious Ethereum accident since The DAO. Although it was not a problem with the Ethereum network, the chain reaction caused by the Infura outage at the time could almost be considered as a short-term paralysis of the Ethereum network: mainstream trading platforms were unable to charge and withdraw ERC-20 tokens, MetaMask was unusable, and so on.

Small problems also continue. In February this year, OpenSea, Uniswap and other platforms encountered problems again because Infura's traffic surged and it crashed. Infura has obviously become the foundation of this building with a market value of $320 billion.

As early as 2018, developers have expressed concerns about Infura. Afri Schoedon, an Ethereum developer at Parity Technologies, said that 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 project owners or users building their own nodes, we have many other projects to choose from, such as Alchemy, or the highly popular Pocket Network, etc. Although the impact of Infura's failure will not completely disappear, 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, Ethereum will be more perfect, even more perfect than ETH2.0.

5 Infura Alternatives

QuikNode

There are many problems to be solved when building an Ethereum node, such as security, network speed and storage space. As a blockchain development platform, QuikNode can solve these problems by directly providing full nodes. It has received $5.3 million in financing led by the co-founder of Reddit, and completed a $35 million financing led by Tiger Global in October last year.

QuickNode provides elastic and dedicated node services for users' applications and DApps, that is, application programming interfaces (APIs) that can query blockchain data and facilitate the operation of decentralized applications. Similar to Infura, it lowers the threshold for accessing Ethereum data.

However, it should be noted that QuickNode does not provide shared public nodes, but dedicated nodes. It only accepts calls from user DApps, which improves blockchain access performance. It currently supports 11 blockchains, including BSC, Bitcoin, Solana, Optimism, Fantom, Terra, Arbitrum, Gnosis, Polygon, Ethereum and Celo.

Alchemy

Alchemy is a widely used blockchain API. Alchemy's supernode service is used by Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Flow and Crypto.org. The service provides extensive API support, allowing developers to easily access multiple functions through a node, including JSON-RPC support, while providing the strong reliability, data correctness and resilience required to run world-class applications on the blockchain.

In the introduction on Alchemy's official website, a brief summary is "Use a dedicated distributed system to expand the functionality of each node, and use a proprietary coordinator service to maintain real-time data correctness." If we replace it with a concept that is more familiar to the majority of Internet users, Alchemy's vision can be understood as a blockchain version of AWS and Alibaba Cloud.

Just as in Web2, developers can avoid server maintenance, operation and maintenance by renting AWS. Alchemy also provides developers with a basic decentralized architecture that separates different types of data into special data storage to improve speed and reliability. In other words, applications can be built on the chain with fewer engineering resources, which is very similar to Amazon's AWS.

Alex Atallah, co-founder of OpenSea, once praised Alchemy: "Using your own nodes or error-prone services means wasting valuable engineering time on insignificant issues. Alchemy's reliability, speed, and support are amazing."

In addition to the main service, Alchemy also provides a variety of other services, such as development solutions, integrated monitoring dashboards, Web 3.0 push services, etc.

Pocket Network

Pocket Network is also a decentralized API protocol serving Web3. With Pocket DAO guiding the long-term development of the protocol, it provides a two-sided market consisting of full node supply and demand, with applications on one end and full node infrastructure providers on the other.

Its token is POKT. Developers can stake POKT according to their own needs to obtain API services. They can withdraw the staked tokens at any time when they do not need to use the services. However, in order to mobilize the liquidity of POKT, Pocket has released wPOKT to attract other applications to join.

The network is run by tens of thousands of distributed nodes. There is no centralized server and single point of failure. That is to say, even if a node providing services to developers fails, other nodes will continue to provide services. This provides a solution with high fault tolerance, low cost and flexible API services.

Moralis

Moralis is a Web3 development middleware that provides developers with a scalable backend infrastructure, allowing users to focus on the front end of the application. A series of complex processes of interacting with the chain can be simply completed through Moralis, thereby saving development costs and improving the reliability of on-chain interaction functions.

Similar to other competing products, Moralis also provides developers with on-chain alert push, smart contract monitoring and other functions. Currently, Moralis supports multiple networks such as Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Solana and Elrond. Developers can quickly develop cross-chain DApps based on Moralis.

Additionally, Moralis provides other great tools for general DApp development. Some examples include native support for IPFS, cross-chain compatibility, and great support for developers. The Moralis blog also has great guides for you to check out and get a better idea of ​​what’s possible for Moralis users.

Currently, products such as SuperFarm, 1inch, Chainlink, utrust, and Covalent have been connected to Moralis' services.

Bware Labs

Bware Labs is a distributed API infrastructure startup that is building a multi-chain subscription-based API platform that provides an interface between blockchain API consumers and node providers, allowing enterprises and developers to execute data requests on multiple integrated blockchains.

In the beginning, all infrastructure needs will be provided by Bware Labs' own servers, which means that this can fully understand the needs of partners and adjust the infrastructure before accepting third-party node providers. However, when enough third-party node providers join, most of its own nodes will withdraw and turn into a monitoring role.

Bware Labs disclosed on February 23 that it had completed a $6 million financing. Most of its team members are former Ankr developers, and some of them have worked at Google.

Its token is abbreviated as BWR, which can be used to earn profits from the platform's entrusted node providers, pledge, participate in protocol governance, and obtain rewards from validators. The distribution data has not been disclosed yet.