Ethereum, please take a seat. As some of your best friends and coworkers, we’ve brought you here today to discuss how your actions are affecting all of us, and how we need you to be better. Frankly, Eth, you’re addicted to Amazon Web Services. You’re supposed to be the future of Web3, so we put up with your excessive gas fees, your slow and inefficient proof-of-work mining model, but your reliance on AWS is simply a bridge too far. This is your Ethervention.
It’s old man AWS!
Eth, your addiction to AWS is your biggest problem. You’re a leader in Web3, helping popularize smart contracts, blockchains, broad market cryptocurrencies, and NFTs. But in order to get all of it done and grow quickly, you rely on Amazon’s AWS for almost all of your front-end web hosting. Blockchains are built on a decentralized architecture that eliminates points of failure, and yet, here you are, depending on Uncle Bezos to host the websites that act as the gateways to Ethereum applications. Every time AWS has a hiccup and goes down, OpenSea goes with it — functionally taking Ethereum with it.
We’re here to tell you, it doesn’t have to be like this. Just look at the Internet Computer. It’s not dependent on Amazon. Since web hosting is built into the core of the Internet Computer’s architecture, everything from the smallest JPEGs to the most important web pages are hosted on the chain, integrated at the most fundamental level inside each canister (the ICP term for the container that holds a Dapp). Every canister hosts the smart contracts, assets, websites — and everything else it needs — internally, and is backed by DFINITY’s world-class cryptography stack.
Amazon all the way down
Eth, you’ve said “I can quit AWS anytime I want,” but instead just keep getting AWS even more involved in your day-to-day operations. AWS isn’t just limited to web hosting — the problem runs much, much deeper. Seventy percent of all Ethereum nodes are hosted on AWS, making Ethereum highly dependent on Amazon to keep the basic structure of the system online and working. That means, with a simple policy change, Amazon could shut down Ethereum with the flip of a switch — an unacceptable risk for a key piece of Web3 infrastructure.
The Internet Computer has a more thoughtful design, free of codependent reliance on AWS hosting. ICP is hosted on a decentralized collection of physical servers in data centers all over the world. Node operators earn tokens for hosting subnet servers. Risk is naturally distributed among a variety of different hosts, eliminating a single point of failure like AWS. ICP’s distributed approach prevents any one host from controlling the whole network.
For all of these reasons, and more, Ethereum, we think it’s time for a change. Since you won’t stop depending on Amazon to provide both the back-end AND front-end of your network, it would be better if we saw other blockchains. If you want to reach us, we’ll be staying with the Internet Computer.
