Recent AWS outages exposed critical vulnerabilities in centralized web3 infrastructure.
The blockchain infrastructure firm Infura, owned by Consensys, is expanding its API network. This network, called the Decentralized Infrastructure Network (DIN), now operates on EigenLayer. EigenLayer is a protocol that lets Ethereum participants reuse their staked ETH to secure external services.
An outage at Amazon Web Services last month took Infura offline. This event pushed the company to find a more resilient solution.
The integration with EigenLayer makes DIN the first large-scale API and RPC marketplace to run as an Autonomous Verifiable Service. This model introduces a system of economic incentives. Operators who keep the service online earn rewards. However, if the service fails, those same operators lose a portion of their staked funds.
E.G. Galano, Co-founder of Infura, explained that EigenLayer allows the team to realize its vision on a proven restaking standard. He stated this standard is backed by the most solid asset in the crypto space: restaked ETH.
Since February 2024, DIN has handled real user requests. The network routes more than 13 billion requests each month. It operates across over 30 networks and platforms, including the Ethereum mainnet, the Layer 2 network Linea, and the web3 wallet MetaMask.
If one provider fails, requests automatically switch to another without service interruption. The EigenLayer integration adds a layer of economic accountability on top of this existing traffic. This move makes reliability a financially costly factor for operators to ignore.
Infura identified a weak point in web3 infrastructure. According to the firm, 70% to 80% of current RPC traffic flows through a small group of centralized providers.
Data from the website Ethernodes confirms this trend. Over half of Ethereum’s execution nodes, which process blockchain data, host on cloud services. Approximately 28% of these nodes run on Amazon’s cloud. Another 15.6% operate in Hetzner’s European data centers.
