Infura is developing a decentralized marketplace of data providers that will help prevent Web3 application failures in the future, according to a Feb. 6 Cointelegraph interview with Infura researcher Patrick McCorry.
McCorry stated that the new “Dfura” or “Decentralized Infura” will help ensure that blockchains remain decentralized by distributing data provider services among multiple providers in a marketplace. It will have “up to 10 providers initially” who will “work together to start the network and then (…) Gradually iterate and get more players.” Some potential partners will meet at ETH Denver in late February or early March to discuss the next steps for 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 will have something in the system. They can place the resources that are available to them, so I can say that I can satisfy these requests at this price. Users could come in and then buy those resources and then it’s like a user matching service.”
McCorry believes this will make the Web3 ecosystem more resilient by allowing users to quickly switch to a new provider if the one they are currently using experiences an outage. He also claimed that the new “Dfura” could be more resistant to censorship than the current service because the providers will be distributed in many different geographic areas and will operate under different jurisdictions.
Related: Are we still mad at Metamask and Consensus for spying on us?
Infura is a set of APIs and development tools used by Web3 application developers to extract data from blockchains. It is used by many different Web3 applications, including Metamask, Gnosis, Aragon, and others. It is also used by many centralized exchanges to track deposit and withdrawal transactions.
Although blockchain networks charge transaction fees 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 to read data, which typically does not result in an on-chain transaction fee.
As Infura has become increasingly used by developers, it has been criticized for supposedly being too centralized. In November 2020, the Metamask wallet app disrupted working for most users when Infura’s servers crashed, and some centralized exchanges were no longer able to get accurate transaction data. 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 were based on an interview with Patrick McCorry conducted by Cointelegraph’s Andrew Fenton at Starkware Sessions 2023 in Tel Aviv.
