🐭The Problem
Last updated
Last updated
Launching a blockchain requires bootstrapping two key components: validators and RPC nodes. Validators have inherent rewards, making their onboarding easier. However, RPC nodes lack such incentives, posing a significant challenge. Without rewards, node operators have no motivation to contribute compute power or scale their infrastructure. To compensate, many chains run their own RPC nodes as public endpoints, offering free access. These public nodes, however, are neither scalable nor reliable for production use. This gap has fueled the adoption of centralized RPC providers, but these services come with several drawbacks and primarily focus on supporting a handful of top-performing chains, leaving others underserved.
Centralized RPC providers have gained traction due to their convenience and ease of integration. However, they fall short of meeting the critical demands of a decentralized ecosystem. Their inherent limitations not only compromise the core principles of Web3—decentralization, trustlessness, and resilience—but also present significant scalability and security challenges.
1. Scalability and Coverage
Centralized providers often prioritize only the most prominent Layer 1 blockchains (like Ethereum) or widely adopted Layer 2 scaling solutions, such as Optimism and Arbitrum. This leaves emerging Layer 1s, Layer 2s, and rollups without sufficient RPC infrastructure, creating a bottleneck for adoption.
For newer chains, bootstrapping RPC infrastructure is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. Without support from centralized providers, dApps on these chains face challenges in providing reliable and scalable services to their users. Furthermore, centralized platforms struggle to scale effectively as the multichain ecosystem expands, leaving a fragmented infrastructure landscape.
2. Security Concerns
Centralized RPC platforms are inherently vulnerable to single points of failure, making them attractive targets for attackers. Over the years, various security incidents have highlighted their fragility:
Privacy Leaks: Centralized platforms have been known to collect and potentially sell user data to third parties, including bots and analytics services, violating the privacy expectations of Web3 users.
DNS Hijacking: Domain Name System (DNS) attacks have compromised RPC endpoints, redirecting users to malicious servers that steal data or funds.
Censorship: Centralized providers are susceptible to external pressures, such as government regulations or corporate policies, which could lead to censorship of certain transactions or applications.
These vulnerabilities directly contradict Web3’s vision of trustless interactions, where users should be able to interact with the blockchain securely and without intermediaries.
3. Reliability
One of the most glaring issues with centralized RPC providers is their unreliability during high-traffic events. Major blockchain events, such as NFT drops or token launches, often overwhelm their infrastructure, leading to frequent downtimes. This disrupts user experiences and causes significant losses for dApps reliant on these platforms.
The reliance on centralized infrastructure also makes entire dApps vulnerable to a single provider's performance. If an RPC provider experiences downtime, the dApps using their services effectively become unusable, breaking the trust of their user base.
4. Data Integrity and Trust Issues
In Web3, where trustless interactions are paramount, centralized RPC providers create uncertainty around data integrity:
Accuracy Concerns: Users have no visibility into whether the data returned by these providers is accurate or tampered with.
Opaque Processes: The centralized nature of these platforms means users must place blind trust in their operations, undermining the transparency expected in a decentralized ecosystem.
For example, centralized RPC providers could theoretically censor or modify data being sent to users, impacting dApps that rely on precise blockchain information. This introduces risks of transaction manipulation and misinformation, which are unacceptable in critical financial or governance applications.
5. Misalignment with Web3 Principles
Web3 was designed to eliminate intermediaries and empower individuals to interact with decentralized systems in a trustless and transparent manner. However, centralized RPC providers reintroduce many of the issues Web3 sought to solve:
Centralized Gatekeeping: A small group of providers controls access to the blockchain, consolidating power and influence.
Lack of Decentralization: Their existence as central hubs creates choke points that could cripple the ecosystem if exploited.
This fundamental misalignment indicates that centralized RPC providers are not a sustainable solution for Web3’s infrastructure needs.
As more Layer 1s, Layer 2s, and rollups are launched, the need for seamless interactions between dApps and their respective chains continues to grow. However, building infrastructure support for every chain is a monumental challenge. Each chain comes with unique architectures, requiring tailored solutions that centralized platforms cannot scale to meet. The fragmentation across chains and their infrastructures has created a bottleneck, preventing Web3 from realizing its full potential. A scalable, decentralized RPC interaction layer is not just beneficial—it is inevitable for the multichain era.
