Anthony Pompliano, founder of Morgan Creek Digital, drew attention to the problem of Ethereum infrastructure deployment, much of which relies on cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). He argues that because of this, popular decentralized applications can be disrupted by the will of the head of the company Jeff Bezos.
Like any other software, the cryptographic infrastructure needs to be hosted. The proliferation of the Ethereum blockchain makes this task more difficult, and users and developers are less and less inclined to solve it themselves and prefer to use third-party services.
"He (Jeff Bezos) can stop most of the "DeFi" applications based on Ethereum by simply turning off AWS. You are not decentralized if you run servers with Uncle Jeff," Pompliano wrote.
The journalist Camilla Russo supported the remark, but only in part: "Of course, the Ethereum nodes could be more decentralized. Nevertheless, the facts do not support this statement".
Russo pointed to the data from the portal Ethernodes, according to which 70.5% of nodes Ethereum use cloud services. Of these, AWS nodes account for about 37% or less than a quarter of the total. Thus, Bezos on its own will not stop the entire Ethereum network, said Russo.
The founder of ShapeShift, Eric Vourchis, stated that the same situation can be seen in the bitcoin blockage, as many servers are based on AWS. The facts, however, were not on his side either. Investor Alex Thorne cited statistics according to which the bitcoin network is "much better distributed" and is largely supported by users running nodes on their home computers.