Decentralized applications (dapps) project themselves as censorship-resistant, round-the-clock available protocols without a single point of failure. But they uncomfortably hide a bitter truth — most users access these protocols through a few centralized doorways. Consequently, it turns the promise of decentralization into a mere illusion and marketing gimmick.
The stakes are much higher now with agentic AI, DePIN, and autonomous finance protocols running on data sources that cannot afford downtime. In this tech ecosystem, decentralization is not just an aspiring ideology but an absolute necessity for these mission-critical systems to live up to their promise. And these high-availability applications cannot be built on a fragile infrastructure; they require a robust, decentralized foundation.
The Specter of Centralized Infrastructure Haunts Tech Ecosystems
A dapp is only as resilient as its weakest link, and that weak link is data accessibility. History shows how decentralized networks have faced outages due to their reliance on centralized infrastructure.
In November 2020, a bug affected Infura, one of the primary centralized gateways to Ethereum, causing a global shutdown for Ethereum users. Crypto balances disappeared from MetaMask, transactions failed, major exchanges like Binance froze ETH and other ERC-20 token withdrawals, and the DeFi ecosystem collapsed.
Around the same time, an oracle glitch led to a faulty price feed from a singular source in Compound, draining $89 million in minutes. The ‘unstoppable’ financial system thus suddenly became ‘stoppable’ and vulnerable to single points of failure, all due to centralized infrastructure.
But these are not half a decade-old lore. In March 2022, a configuration error on Infura and Alchemy blocked Venezuelan users from accessing their wallets. , in August, US sanctions took down the website and GitHub of Tornardo Cash, demonstrating how decentralized protocols can be censored by targeting centralized chokepoints.
A year later, in December 2023, the Arbitrum sequencer went down for an hour, halting all transactions. Soon after, the growth of Layer-2 chains like Base and their corresponding apps like Friend.tech led to RPC performance issues and massive outages. Simultaneously, dependencies on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure prove how Web3 still runs on centralized cloud providers.
The dangers from these systematic risks have increased manifold with the rise of emerging tech apps and mission-critical systems requiring uninterrupted and incorruptible data. For these systems, data availability isn’t just a requirement, but a life-or-death scenario.
For example, consider self-driving cars following an automated traffic grid system, where a 5-second data outage can result in missed signals, wrong turns, and potential collisions, potentially leading to loss of human life. The risk of such system downtime will be catastrophic and cannot be measured in dollars.
Or take DePIN networks. A compromised centralized data aggregator will threaten the entire network of sensors and devices running weather stations, energy grids, or internet hotspots. Similarly, agentic AI systems running on real-time data can upend businesses and supply chains if the data feed faces sudden outages.
In this climate, data sovereignty becomes a critical necessity, and decentralized infrastructure rails are the only alternative.
The Need For Open, Decentralized Data Infrastructure
The first step towards a decentralized ecosystem is a distributed network of nodes that can provide reliable, censorship-resistant RPC accessibility.
But with an emerging data-driven autonomous world, it’s not just about decentralized RPCs reading block data from dapps, it’s about maintaining uptime for systems that can’t afford to go down.
In other words, data sovereignty and unstoppable infrastructure aren’t just nice-to-have philosophies in the new world. Rather, they’re non-negotiable requirements for building high-availability apps and protocols on top of robust, decentralized foundations.
To do so, infrastructure protocols must focus on providing open data delivery networks for the $393 billion open data market. Such open data networks will not only serve blockchains, but any data-dependent systems, making it a universal layer for future-proof apps.
A full-stack decentralized infrastructure offers multiple benefits, including a permissionless front end for network access, no intermediaries, true censorship resistance, and unstoppable data accessibility.
The unstoppability doesn’t come from having a lot of nodes, but through smart and instantaneous failovers. If one node is slow or offline, data requests can be intelligently rerouted to other globally distributed nodes. Thus, for financial applications or futuristic automated traffic grids, failover-related rerouting to a live data source will happen in milliseconds, without adversely impacting users.
The architectural choices tech companies make now will shape the resilience and sovereignty of tomorrow’s digital worlds. With each high-availability app and critical system that comes online, even a few microseconds of downtime will have a significant real-world impact.
Developers and founders can no longer afford to build on centralized infrastructure. Anything with a single point of failure is a death knell for emerging tech. Decentralized infrastructure should thus be the primary foundation for data delivery as uptime and data integrity become non-negotiable aspects of the new world order.
