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Regulators around the world are increasingly looking to domesticate crypto, bringing it within the purview of existing financial laws, norms and frameworks.
This can legitimate the sector in the eyes of the public and boost adoption, but there is increasing tension over the decentralized merits of blockchain-based projects and their vulnerability to regulatory or governmental control and censorship with decentralized finance (DeFi) and decentralized exchanges (DEXs) front and center.
Despite the widespread perception that lacking a centralized controller helps them evade oversight, there remains a particular area in which DApps and blockchain services are indeed almost glaringly vulnerable to gatekeepers and bad actors.
Many DeFi DApps use centralized cloud services for their user-facing front ends the part of a website or service that users see and interact with. This opens them up to takedown or cease and desist orders directed at cloud services that would effectively take them offline, even if their respective blockchains continued running the backend. It also makes them less verifiable and secure.
DeFi isn’t completely decentralized
A quick search of any reliable ‘hosting checker‘ website reveals that many of the leading DeFi platforms use some kind of centralized cloud service. Here are a few examples.
- Instadapp.io Cloudflare
- Uniswap.org Amazon
- Aave.com Cloudflare
- Curve.fi Amazon
- Compound.finance Cloudflare
- Convexfinance.com Amazon
- Yearn.finance Amazon
- Sushi.com Amazon
Needless to say, it is cognitively dissonant that otherwise decentralized apps such as Uniswap and SushiSwap are reliant on big companies like Cloudflare and Amazon for users to even be able to access them. It’s this dependency on centralized web hosting that puts many big DeFi platforms at the mercy of potential takedown orders.
Reliance on centralized cloud services such as AWS,…
