Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain, said decentralization applications (DApps) could mitigate failures in internet infrastructure, such as when internet services provider Cloudflare experienced a massive outage in November.
In a Thursday X post, Buterin Ethereum needed to do more to achieve its mission of “[building] the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet.” According to the co-founder, that started with DApps that “run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference” and are usable at scale on the blockchain.
“Applications where if you’re a user, you don’t even notice if Cloudflare goes down – or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea,” said Buterin. “Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this – for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build.”
The Cloudflare outage, which resulted in about 20% of the platform’s websites going down in November, was caused by a software failure. According to a post-mortem from the company, a “feature file” used by its bot management system as a response to cyberattacks grew beyond its normal limit.
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Because many crypto platforms were affected by the same outage, as well as one in October, many questioned the reliability of centralized internet infrastructure. Websites including Coinbase, Blockchain.com, BitMEX and Ledger went offline.
“Decentralization erodes not through capture, but through convenience,” said Buterin and Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner in a manifesto released on Nov. 11. “It drifts — automatically, continually — toward dependence on trust.”
The Ethereum co-founder has been a regular figure on socials, offering takes on the crypto industry and technology through his blog and other media. In early December, he needed a “good trustless onchain gas futures market,” giving users certainty over blockchain transaction fees.
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