The recent AWS outage that disrupted significant platforms such as Coinbase, Robinhood, and MetaMask has sparked renewed concern about the degree of centralization in the Web3 environment.
Despite uninterrupted blockchain operations, users found themselves unable to access vital services due to the centralized nature of many of their interfaces and APIs hosted on AWS and other major service providers.
“Decentralization has succeeded at the ledger layer but not yet at the infrastructure layer,” said Jamie Elkaleh from Bitget Wallet.
“Real resilience depends on diversifying beyond hyperscalers into community-driven and distributed networks.”
Elkaleh pointed out that achieving complete decentralization is currently impractical due to reliance on bigger cloud services for critical operations and regulatory compliance. He advocates for a hybrid infrastructure blend that leverages both cloud and decentralized solutions to mitigate the risks tied to single-point failures.
Another perspective came from Anthurine Xiang who remarked on the reliance of Web3 services on centralized frameworks during the disruption. She emphasized that genuine decentralization necessitates a holistic overhaul of systems to eliminate any sole dependency on a service provider.
“It’s like the house is fine, but the door is jammed,” Xiang noted, highlighting the frustrations users faced when trying to access functioning blockchains amidst the outage.
Jawad Ashraf criticized the industry’s trend of depending on a few server providers, indicating that a significant portion of Ethereum’s network is hosted by giants like AWS, Google, or Microsoft. He recommended that moving toward a more decentralized structure is imperative for the long-term survival of crypto systems.
As the outage serves as a critical reminder, Elkaleh stated that investment in decentralized cloud infrastructure should swiftly increase.
“Every major outage is a wake-up call. The future of Web3 won’t be defined by how decentralized the tokens are, but by how distributed the infrastructure truly becomes,” he asserted.
