Infura is developing a decentralized data provider marketplace that will help prevent Web3 application crashes in the future, according to a Feb. 6 interview by Cointelegraph to Patrick McCorry, Infura researcher.
McCorry stated that the new “dfura” either “Decentralized Infura” will help ensure that blockchains remain decentralized by distributing data provider services among multiple providers in one marketplace. It will have “up to 10 providers initially” who “will work together to get the network started and then […] gradually iterate and get more players.” Some potential partners will meet at the ETH in Denver in late February or early March to discuss the next steps of the project.
The new project will not be a new blockchain. Instead, it will be a marketplace connecting blockchain data consumers with data providers, as McCorry explained:
“There will be a marketplace where basically new vendors will sign up, they’ll have some stick in the system. They’ll be able to put whatever resources they have available, so I can say, I can meet these requests at this price. Users will be able to come and buy those resources, and then it will be like a user search service”.
McCorry believes thatThis will make the Web3 ecosystem more resilient by allowing users to quickly switch to a new provider if their current provider goes down. He also stated that the new “Dfura” could be more resistant to censorship than the current service because the providers will be spread across many different geographical areas and will operate under different jurisdictions.
Infura is a set of APIs and developer tools that Web3 application developers use to extract data from blockchains. It is used by many different Web3 applications, such as Metamask, Gnosis, and Aragon, among others. It is also used by many centralized exchanges to keep track of deposit and withdrawal transactions.
Although blockchain networks charge fees per transaction to prevent too many transactions from overloading the servers, these fees are only charged to users who write data to the blockchain. Infura has emerged as a way to charge developers or users for reading data, which usually does not carry an on-chain transaction fee.
As Infura has been increasingly used by developers, it has come under fire for allegedly being too centralized. In November 2020, the Metamask wallet app stopped working for most users when Infura’s servers went down, and some centralized exchanges were no longer able to get accurate transaction data from it. This led some critics to question whether Ethereum can be genuinely decentralized as long as developers rely on Infura to provide data to their users.
Parts of this article are based on an interview with Patrick McCorry conducted by Cointelegraph’s Andrew Fenton at Starkware Sessions 2023 in Tel Aviv.
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