Why Web3 dApps Fail When the Cloud Goes Down and How to Fix It!
Otherwise, the vision of the web3 is a web fully decentralized network which could be shut down, censored and controlled unilaterally. Perhaps incredible today, even dApps cannot do without centralized cloud providers like AWS or Cloudflare when they go down. In the end, even the technology of the blockchain is decentralized. However most of its supporting mechanisms are not. Platform Due to the miscommunications between the on-chain and off-chain. While the blockchain layer is in charge of the consensus, transactions and State, the off-chain layer comprising items like frontends, RPC gateways, APIs, and data indexers almost backs up on the centralized cloud. if one of these cloud providers breaks down for a short period of time, neither the user interface, nor the apps that connect to it on this chain survive, regardless of whether the blockchain itself continues to run smoothly. Last October, the US-East-1 zone was taken out of service. Throughout Web2 and Web3. Slow performance on Coinbase and Robinhood, MBAOs, and even blockchain wallets was reported.
Is that the immediate cause? And the fact that everything “began” to work when the cloud-based gateways, which work between the nodes, were done around which the functioning of eth.net, btc.com, etc. for the end-user was drastically limited. This way, the fact that Infura failed resulted in MetaMask displaying Ethereum balance as – zero. The network itself operated as serviceably as it did until then. However, to consolidate this conditional success, wholly changing applications and wallets so that their priority on the default would be housed in modified Infura nodes’s analog portal they do Work! centralized service layer. This one example shows just how much most of the dApps are adding onto very centralized infrastructure. Storage decentralization solutions, such as IPFS, are making their users access nodes via centralized gateways. When these “fall,” then regardless that the overlapped fragments are stored within nodes somewhere across the web and subsequently then also in the blockchain ledger of that network so that you will never lose or forget them It’s an irony that until just recently seemed so logical.
On the other hand, developers continue to build this way because it is fast, familiar, and inexpensive. Many other things that startups need scalability, analytics, and speed are given to them by cloud providers. But, this ease comes at a steep price. Most projects deploy to one region and/or provider; simply, this is a single-point of failure. The potential presumed redundancy is often in practice a mono-culture; those “diverse” services are in fact floated on the same cloud backbone. However, the practical solution is possible. It’s investing in actual redundancy. For instance, the multi-provider RPC redundancy utilizes multiple RPC endpoints. Some are from providers, while others are self-hosted to avoid bottlenecks. The front end nodes draw from multiple CDNs and get backed up on IPFS, ENS/DNSLink records. Indexers, that convert raw blockchain information to human readable formats, divide over different clouds or temporarily attach by direct RPC queries until the downtime concludes. Even small design adjustments make a huge difference. Consider saying “data temporarily not available” or the latest confirmed value when a dApp collapses with “0 balance” after an RPC failure. Users are kinder when apps have a long decline than a sudden demise; trust from transparency is key. Ultimately, true decentralization is not a binary but a continuum.
Users should still be able to reach it when a cloud provider or other centralized service provider sneezes. That means Web3 builders need to keep adding diversity to their dependencies on different clouds, DNS providers, CDNs, and RPCs. And they need to build systems that can bend without breaking. New technology like a shared sequencer, decentralized sequencer, or verifiable light client will help. This was designed to eliminate single points of failure in rollups and indexing but for now, it’s up to developers to be redundant by design, and to remember that resilience isn’t more servers; it’s eliminating Noise wherever possible. Each time one disappears, more is revealed about how vulnerable the Web3 narrative is at the hands of centralized actors. There is no need to perceive it as a prolog of future Web3 failure. Each outage is a stress test that shows how susceptible the decentralization narrative is to centralized actors, found still existing there. People who take access as seriously as they do consensus see a future where a truly decentralized internet not only survives when the cloud disappears but has been doing so calmly and almost invisibly ever since, without asking for permission.
