smart summary beta

The implications of such outages should be seen as particularly alarming for those in cryptoland: namely, for the ever-growing numbers of participants in an emerging decentralized ecosystem for transferring peer-to-peer value with Bitcoin (BTC) who build smart contracts on Ethereum or launch any number of platforms and tokens that perform untold numbers of functions and services.

Indeed, such outages highlight a serious challenge to building the hoped-for future of a decentralized web that is more secure, reliable and safer.

It’s a problem that has grown far worse during the COVID-19 pandemic, unfortunately, notably because the web has become even more central to our work and personal lives.

Rising rates of usage were cited as a reason behind the outages that increased 63% in March when compared to the pre-pandemic period.

By June, there were an estimated 44% more disruptions than that which occurred at the beginning of last year.

It’s safe to say that when taking into account that an astounding 25% of all Ethereum workloads in the world run on Amazon Web Services, there should be more than pause for concern.

One is to leverage the strength of the internet as it currently stands, enhancing the mechanics that underpin it by focusing on the abundance of nodes and redundancies in data that are already built into the system.

And with a smarter, more dynamic routing protocol that could easily be layered on top of the existing internet, for example, we can more efficiently route transmissions around the nodes that are blocked or congested and, instead, retrieve data from the nodes through which such data can flow more freely.