Blockchain Short Story 006: Re-centralization

In general, blockchain is a new architectural paradigm that allows us to build intermediary free process- and data-models. In the ideal case, the disintermediation process is shifting the responsibilities (roles) from an intermediary to the technology. However, the reality is that the technology can not hide everything from the user. Not yet at least. Hence, some of the responsibilities land on users’ shoulders. Common examples in the blockchain ecosystem is that users need to manage their own keys and the infrastructure required to access the network and assets existing in this network.

This shift of responsibilities increases the complexity for them. Therefore it’s natural that there is a tendency to re-encapsulate this complexity in centralized services again (back to intermediaries). This is a common thing in web2 when we look at Anything-as-a-Service catalogue. Also web3 is not immune to this. An excellent example for the re-centralization in the blockchain ecosystem is infura.io. It provides quick and reliable access to the Ethereum and IPFS networks through a centrally managed suite of high availability APIs. Comfort versus Decentralization.

Now we can blame web3 for being too complex and urge developers to make web3 easier to use so that centralized API services can be avoided. This might be feasible one day, however, for the foreseeable future centralized services on decentralized infrastructure will stay. The good news, though, is that web3 makes them easily replaceable.

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