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Infura is developing a decentralized market of data providers that will help prevent web3 application crashes in the future, says a Feb. 6 cointelegraph interview with infura investigator patrick mccorry.
Mccorry said the new "dfura" or "decentralized infura" will help ensure that blockchains remain decentralized by distributing services from data providers across multiple providers in one market. It will have "up to 10 suppliers at the outset" who "will work together to start the network and [...] Progressively iterate and obtain more players." Some potential partners will meet at the Denver ETH at the end of February or beginning of March to discuss next steps for the project.
The new project is not going to be another blockchain. Instead, it's going to be a market that pairs blockchain data consumers with data providers, as McCorry explained:
"There's going to be a market for new suppliers to come in, they're going to have sticks in the system. They can invest the resources they have, so I can say I can meet those demands at that cost. Users could come in and buy these things, and then it's like a user matching service."
McCorry believes this will make the Web3 ecosystem more resilient by allowing users to rapidly switch to a new provider if the one they are currently using experiences an outage. He also stated that the new “Dfura” might be more censorship-resistant than the current service because providers will be spread out over many different geographical areas and operating under different jurisdictions.
Related: Are we still mad at METAMASK and Consensus for snooping on us?
Infura is a set of apis and development tools which web3 application developers use to extract data from blockchains. It is used by many web 3 applications, including metamask, gnosis, aragon, and more. It is also used by many central exchange centres to monitor deposit and withdrawal operations.
Although blockchain networks charge transaction fees to prevent too many transactions from overloading servers, these fees are only charged to users writing data to the blockchain. Infura appeared as a way to charge developers or users for reading data, which generally does not entail transaction costs on the channel.
Since infura is being used more and more by developers, it has been criticized for being allegedly too centralized. In November 2020, the Metamask wallet app stopped working for most users when Infura servers went down, and some centralized exchanges were prevented from getting accurate transaction data from it anymore. This led some critics to question whether Ethereum can be genuinely decentralized as long as developers depend on Infura to provide data for their users.
Some of this article is based on an interview of Patrick McCorry by Andrew Fenton of Cointelegraph at the 2023 Starkware Sessions in Tel Aviv.
