What, exactly, have we decentralized?
What, exactly, have we decentralized?
All roads lead back to AWS.
I stumbled down a little bit of a rabbit hole last night while doing some research on Ethereum (what thrilling Saturday nights shelter-in-place provides!)
According to ethernodes.org, there are roughly 7,000 synced full Ethereum nodes discoverable today.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of full Ethereum nodes are… not running in your average person’s living room. So where are they running?
Between Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft, and Google, 50% of our collective memory of the blockchain’s history is in the hands of the tech giants.
What about the exchanges?
First, let me caveat by saying that a website’s public DNS data rarely presents a full picture of what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s still insightful nonetheless.
Based on CoinMarketCap’s ranking data, here’s where the top 10 exchanges are hosted:
Binance - AWS
Huobi - AWS
Coinbase - Cloudflare
Kraken - Cloudflare
Bithumb - Cloudflare
Bitfinex - Cloudflare
ZB.com - Alibaba
BitFlyer - Akamai
UpBit - Cloudflare
Bittrex - Cloudflare
I didn’t go digging any deeper than that, but I would bet that a good number of the exchanges behind Cloudflare are likely AWS customers as well.
What about the DEXes?
While DEXes (“decentralized exchanges”) are frequently set up with the stated goal of fostering permissionless trading, many of their entry points rely on Big Tech as well.
Bisq.network - Cloudflare
Uniswap - AWS
1inch.exchange - Cloudflare
Curve.fi - AWS
IDEX - Cloudflare
DyDx - Cloudflare
Will the show still go on for these sites, even if Cloudflare and AWS go down? Probably. Will it be massively disruptive if AWS decides it’s no longer in the cryptocurrency hosting business? You bet.
What about the rest of DeFi?
A non-exhaustive list of other major parts of the decentralized finance ecosystem hosted with Big Tech:
MyEtherWallet - Cloudflare
MyCrypto - AWS
Tornado.cash - AWS
CryptoScamDB - AWS
Infura.io - AWS
Blockchain.com - Cloudflare
EtherScan - Cloudflare
BTC.com - Alibaba (with AWS Route53 DNS)
Bitcoin.com - AWS Route53 DNS
Conclusion
There’s nothing inherently malicious about using AWS or Cloudflare. For many development teams, that’s more often than not the right decision from a security and scalability perspective. It does, however, mean that a decentralized future is heavily reliant on the goodwill of two companies. We should be thoughtful about the implications of that.